Police say that a 71-year-old man was killed after being struck by a Tesla allegedly in Full Self-Driving mode, ABC 7 News reports, in what appears to be yet another casualty of Elon Musk’s self-driving technology.
The fatal accident took place early Thursday morning when the elderly pedestrian attempted to cross a stretch of the I-80 highway in Vallejo, according to the California High Patrol.
Officers responded to a collision reported around 2:35 AM, finding the man severely injured when they arrived at the scene. He was later pronounced dead.
The Tesla driver, a 26-year-old man from San Francisco, stayed at the scene and told officers that his car was running FSD, which requires constant driver supervision and isn’t technically considered capable of driving on its own, when he collided with the man.
The CHP said it reviewed dashcam footage of the crash showing the Tesla traveling around 70 miles per hour when the pedestrian walked onto the freeway from the right shoulder.
It also showed the “Tesla’s brakes being applied as the vehicle steered to the left in an effort to avoid the pedestrian,” it said in a statement on social media, as quoted by ABC 7. “Despite these evasive actions, the right front portion of the Tesla struck the individual.”
It’s unclear from the wording if these actions were taken by the driver or the software.
The pedestrian was struck by at least one other vehicle while lying on the highway, the CHP said, but no other vehicles stopped to cooperate with authorities.
“The Solano Area CHP extends its deepest condolences to the family and friends of the deceased during this difficult time,” the department said.
Incidentally, it’s not the only accident involving a self-driving Teslas that happened on the Californian stretch of the I-80. Last week, another Tesla running FSD plowed into a police cruiser that was stopped at the scene of a car crash after the driver allegedly fell asleep at the wheel, sending two officers to the hospital.
“Despite its name, full self-driving is not fully autonomous,” the CHP stressed in a statement after the crash. “Technology does not relieve drivers of their responsibility to safely operate their vehicles.”
In 2023, a Tesla running FSD struck and killed an elderly woman in Arizona who was helping direct traffic after an accident up the road brought it to a standstill. Footage appeared to show the car’s front cameras being blinded by Sun’s glare, which may have confused the software, since Teslas rely purely on vision and no other forms of detection like lidar to perceive their surroundings. Tesla settled the lawsuit brought by the woman’s family for an undisclosed fee this June.
Details on this latest death are still scant. A man suddenly walking onto a highway at night would be hard for a human driver to avoid, too, but we don’t know how much reasonable warning either the software — or the human who was supposed to be supervising it — had.
More on self-driving: We Are Alarmed to Learn That People Are Installing DIY Self-Driving “Mods” on Their Cars
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