17 fatalities, 736 crashes
The school bus was displaying its stop sign and flashing red warning lights, a police report said, when Tillman Mitchell, 17, stepped off one afternoon in March. Then a Tesla Model Y approached on North Carolina Highway 561.
The car — allegedly in Autopilot mode — never slowed down.
It struck Mitchell at 45 mph. The teenager was thrown into the windshield, flew into the air and landed face down in the road, according to his great-aunt, Dorothy Lynch. Mitchell’s father heard the crash and rushed from his porch to find his son lying in the middle of the road.
“If it had been a smaller child,” Lynch said, “the child would be dead.”
The crash in North Carolina’s Halifax County, where a futuristic technology came barreling down a rural highway with devastating consequences, was one of 736 U.S. crashes since 2019 involving Teslas in Autopilot mode — far more than previously reported, according to a Washington Post analysis of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data. The number of such crashes has surged over the past four years, the data shows, reflecting the hazards associated with increasingly widespread use of Tesla’s futuristic driver-assistance technology, as well as the growing presence of the cars on the nation’s roadways.
The number of deaths and serious injuries associated with Autopilot also has grown significantly, the data shows. When authorities first released a partial accounting of accidents involving Autopilot in June 2022, they counted only three deaths definitively linked to the technology. The most recent data includes at least 17 fatal incidents, 11 of them since last May, and five serious injuries.
NHTSA, the nation’s top auto safety regulator, began collecting the data after a federal order in 2021 required automakers to disclose crashes involving driver-assistance technology. The total number of crashes involving the technology is minuscule compared with all road incidents; NHTSA estimates that more than 40,000 people died in wrecks of all kinds last year.
Of hundreds of Tesla driver-assistance crashes, NHTSA has focused on about 40 Tesla incidents for further analysis, hoping to gain deeper insight into how the technology operates. Among them was the North Carolina crash involving Mitchell, the student disembarking from the school bus.
Afterward, Mitchell awoke in the hospital with no recollection of what happened. He still doesn’t grasp the seriousness of it, his aunt said. His memory problems are hampering him as he tries to catch up in school. Local outlet WRAL reported that the impact of the crash shattered the Tesla’s windshield.
The Tesla driver, Howard G. Yee, was charged with multiple offenses in the crash, including reckless driving, passing a stopped school bus and striking a person, a class I felony, according to North Carolina State Highway Patrol Sgt. Marcus Bethea.
In the law - YOU ARE THE OPERATOR. You are behind the wheel of that car and you are responsible for the car. Truth is this is an epidemic across our country. There are many people on autopilot in our country. They believe they can wake up and the day just happens. They claim a lack of responsibility for everything, as they are just "going with life." In the law - there is no autopilot. You are responsible for your actions. If you are not paying attention with autopilot or not, you should and will be held responsible for both your actions and your omissions. Potentially, along with the faulty equipment itself.
Should you ever need assistance due to a car crash with a poor driver or their autopilot please let us know at Winslow Law: 843-357-9301.
May God Bless You, Your Business, and this Country,
Tom Winslow