Potential Danger: The First Fatal Self-Driving Accident

After Joshua Brown, 40, was killed in May while at the wheel of a Tesla Model S, questions arose about the safety of the car’s crash-avoidance Autopilot system. The company has since released a new version. The accident may have happened in part because the crash-avoidance system was designed to engage only when radar and computer vision systems agreed that there was an obstacle, according to an industry executive with direct knowledge of the system. Some experts speculated that a lidar-driven car might have avoided the crash. But the company’s founder and chief executive, Elon Musk, has said the upgrade could have prevented the crash.Federal auto-safety regulators later said that they found no defects in Tesla’s Autopilot system that was used during the crash.