Indian envoy warns of 'big red line,' days after charges laid in Nijjar case
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
A driver was behind the wheel when a Tesla electric car crashed and burned last April in Houston, killing two men, neither of whom was found in the driver's seat.
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board announced the findings in an investigative report released Thursday on the April 17 crash on a residential road in Spring, Texas.
Although first responders found one man in the back seat and the other in the front passenger seat, the NTSB said both the driver and a passenger were in the front seats with belts buckled at the time of the crash. The agency said the car was traveling up to 67 mph in the five seconds leading up to the crash.
The investigation is continuing, and the agency is still looking into the use of Tesla's Autopilot driver assist system, whether the men could get out of the car, driver toxicology tests and other items.
In a preliminary report released in May, the NTSB said home security camera footage showed that the owner of the Tesla Model S got into the driver's seat of the car shortly before the deadly crash. Investigators found that the steering wheel had been damaged by an impact, presumably from the driver.
The crash occurred around 9:07 p.m. on Hammock Dunes Place, a two-lane residential road. Both the 59-year-old owner and the 69-year-old passenger were killed. Previously the NTSB said the 2019 Model S went off the road on a curve, drove over a curb, hit a drainage culvert, a raised manhole and a tree.
In the May report, the NTSB said it tested a different Tesla vehicle on the same road, and the Autopilot driver-assist system could not be fully used. Investigators could not get the system's automated steering system to work, but were able to use Traffic Aware Cruise Control.
Autopilot needs both the cruise control and the automatic steering to function. Traffic Aware Cruise Control can keep the car a safe distance from vehicles in front of it, while autosteer keeps it in its own lane. The report said the road also did not have lane lines. That could have have been why the automatic steering wouldn't work.
The agency says it intends to issue safety recommendations to prevent similar crashes.
The crash damaged the high-voltage lithium-ion battery, where the fire began.
Local authorities said one man was found in the front passenger seat, while another was in the back.
Harris County Precinct Four Constable Mark Herman said at the time the car was traveling at a high speed. He would not say if there was evidence anyone tampered with Tesla's system to monitor the driver, which detects force from hands on the steering wheel. The system will issue warnings and eventually shut the car down if it doesn't detect hands. But critics say Tesla's system is easy to fool and can take as long as a minute to shut down.
Consumer Reports said in April that it was able to easily trick a Tesla into driving in Autopilot mode with no one at the wheel.
The NTSB, which has no regulatory authority and can only make recommendations, said it's working with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on the probe. NHTSA has the power to make vehicle safety regulations. The federal probe is running at the same time as a parallel investigation by local authorities, the NTSB said.
The Texas crash raised questions of whether Autopilot was working at the time, and whether Tesla does enough to make sure drivers are engaged. The company says in owner's manuals and on its website that Autopilot is a driver-assist system and drivers must be ready to take action at any time.
Lars Moravy, Tesla's vice president of vehicle engineering, said on the company's April 26 earnings conference call that an inspection of the badly burned car found that the steering wheel was deformed, "so it was leading to a likelihood that someone was in the driver's seat at the time of the crash." He said all seat belts were found unbuckled.
On Twitter in April, Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote that data logs "recovered so far" in the crashed show Autopilot wasn't turned on, and "Full Self-Driving" was not purchased for the vehicle in the Texas crash. He didn't answer reporters' questions posed on Twitter.
NHTSA has stepped up its investigations into Tesla Autopilot. In August, it opened a formal investigation into the system after a series of collisions with parked emergency vehicles.
The investigation covers 765,000 vehicles, almost everything that Tesla has sold in the U.S. since the start of the 2014 model year. Of the crashes identified as part of the probe, 17 people were injured and one was killed.
NHTSA says it has identified 12 crashes since 2018 in which Teslas on Autopilot or Traffic Aware Cruise Control have hit vehicles at scenes where first responders have used flashing lights, flares, an illuminated arrow board or cones warning of hazards.
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
With Donald Trump sitting just feet away, Stormy Daniels testified Tuesday at the former president's hush money trial about a sexual encounter the porn actor says they had in 2006 that resulted in her being paid to keep silent during the presidential race 10 years later.
The U.S. paused a shipment of bombs to Israel last week over concerns that Israel was approaching a decision on launching a full-scale assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah against the wishes of the U.S.
Footage from dozens of security cameras in the area of Drake’s Bridle Path mansion could be the key to identifying the suspect responsible for shooting and seriously injuring a security guard outside the rapper’s sprawling home early Tuesday morning, a former Toronto homicide detective says.
A chicken farmer near Mattawa made an 'eggstraordinary' find Friday morning when she discovered one of her hens laid an egg close to three times the size of an average large chicken egg.
Susan Buckner, best known for playing peppy Rydell High School cheerleader Patty Simcox in the 1978 classic movie musical 'Grease,' has died. She was 72.
Accused killer Jeremy Skibicki could have a challenging time convincing a judge that he is not criminally responsible for the deaths of four Indigenous women, a legal analyst says.
A Calgary bylaw requiring businesses to charge a minimum bag fee and only provide single-use items when requested has officially been tossed.
Two Nova Scotia men are dead after a boat they were travelling in sank in the Annapolis River in Granville Centre, N.S., on Monday.
An Ontario man says he paid more than $7,700 for a luxury villa he found on a popular travel website -- but the listing was fake.
Whether passionate about Poirot or hungry for Holmes, Winnipeg mystery obsessives have had a local haunt for over 30 years in which to search out their latest page-turners.
Eighty-two-year-old Susan Neufeldt and 90-year-old Ulrich Richter are no spring chickens, but their love blossomed over the weekend with their wedding at Pine View Manor just outside of Rosthern.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A mother goose and her goslings caused a bit of a traffic jam on a busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway near Vancouver Saturday.
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.