US safety agency criticizes Tesla crash data release

WASHINGTON - The US National Transportation Safety Board said on Sunday it was "unhappy" that electric car maker Tesla Inc made public information about the crash of its Model X vehicle on Autopilot that killed the driver last month.

The agency "needs the cooperation of Tesla to decode the data the vehicle recorded," NTSB spokesman Chris O'Neil said in a statement.

"In each of our investigations involving a Tesla vehicle, Tesla has been extremely cooperative on assisting with the vehicle data."

"However, the NTSB is unhappy with the release of investigative information by Tesla," he added.

A Tesla spokesperson declined to comment.

The board's reaction to Tesla was first reported by the Washington Post Sunday evening.

O'Neil was responding to Tesla's announcement on Friday that the Tesla Model X involved in the crash had activated its Autopilot system moments before the March 23 mishap.

The driver, 38, died at a nearby hospital shortly after the vehicle hit a concrete highway divider near Mountain View, California. The mishap involved 2 other vehicles.

"The NTSB is looking into all aspects of this crash including the driver's previous concerns about the autopilot," said O'Neil.

"We will work to determine the probable cause of the crash and our next update of information about our investigation will likely be when we publish a preliminary report, which generally occurs within a few weeks of completion of field work."

Last week, the company said that a search of its service records did not "find anything suggesting that the customer ever complained to Tesla about the performance of Autopilot. There was a concern raised once about navigation not working correctly, but Autopilot's performance is unrelated to navigation."

In its announcement on Friday, the company said that shortly before the crash, the vehicle's "Autopilot was engaged with the adaptive cruise control follow-distance set to minimum."

Autopilot allows drivers to take their hands off the wheel for extended periods under certain conditions. Tesla requires users to agree to keep their hands on the wheel at all times before they can use Autopilot. Users, however, routinely brag they can use the system to drive hands-free.

In its Friday statement, Tesla also said vehicle logs from the accident showed no action had been taken by the driver right before the crash and that he had received earlier warnings to put his hands on the wheel.

The statement did not say why the Autopilot system apparently did not detect the concrete divider.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Tesla taps Apple engineer for Autopilot software

Electric carmaker Tesla Motors Inc. has hired a key Apple Inc. software engineer to oversee its Autopilot self-driving software efforts, Tesla said in a blog post Tuesday.

Chris Lattner, who served at Apple for more than a decade, said in a online message to Apple developers on Tuesday morning that he would "leave Apple later this month to pursue an opportunity in another space" without saying which company he planned to join.

Later in the day, Tesla posted a message on the company's website saying that Lattner had been hired as vice president of Autopilot software but did not say when he would start work there. Tesla declined to comment beyond the announcement. Apple confirmed the departure but would not comment beyond Lattner's posted message.

The move is a significant win for Tesla, bringing a high-profile figure in the world of software development for a position that previously did not have a full-time leader.

Tesla's Autopilot was overseen on an interim basis by the software chief Jinnah Hosein of SpaceX, which is also headed by Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk.

Autopilot is the hardware and software system on Tesla vehicles that allows self-driving in some situations but still requires drivers to keep their hands on the steering wheel. Federal safety regulators in the United States are examining whether Autopilot played a role in a fatal crash in Florida last year.

Lattner most recently served as a senior director in the developer tools department at Apple and was best known for introducing Swift, a programming language that made it easier for software developers to write apps for iOS, the operating system that powers iPhones and iPads.

In addition to developing Swift at Apple, Lattner also led a successful push to make the programming language "open source," meaning that developers could incorporate it into their applications without having to pay fees to Apple.

The move was a first for Apple, which until then had typically tightly controlled the technology it created. Microsoft Corp. and Google parent Alphabet Inc. have also either published or contributed to open-source programming languages.

source: news.abs-cbn.com