A 56-year-old Snohomish man had set his Tesla Model S on Autopilot and was looking at his cellphone on Friday when he struck and killed a motorcyclist in front of him in Monroe, court records show.
A Washington State Patrol trooper arrested the Tesla driver at the crash site on Highway 522 at Fales Road shortly before 4 p.m. on suspicion of vehicular manslaughter, according to a probable cause affidavit.
The motorcyclist, Jeffrey Nissen, 28, of Stanwood, died at the scene, records show.
The Tesla driver told a state trooper he was driving home from having lunch in Bothell and was looking at his phone when he heard a bang and felt his car lurch forward, accelerate and hit the motorcyclist, according to the affidavit.
The man told the trooper his Tesla got stuck on top of the motorcyclist and couldn’t be moved in time to save him, the affidavit states.
The trooper cited the driver’s “inattention to driving, while on autopilot mode, and the distraction of the cell phone while moving forward,” and trusting “the machine to drive for him” as probable cause for a charge of vehicular manslaughter, according to the affidavit.
The man was booked into the Snohomish County Jail and was released Sunday after posting bond on his $100,000 bail, jail records show.
Same deal almost everywhere… but firsthand experience is that a significant portion of all drivers have their phone out.
Would love to see some proportional crash rates of autopilot use vs not autopilot use too. People focus on things like crash totals or death totals. 17 deaths is a tragedy to be sure.
That being said when the US has over 40,000 auto deaths per year… and this article is telling me only 17 deaths are in any way involved with Autopilot since 2019… I really wonder why this is somehow more outrageous than the ~240,913 other vehicle deaths in the US since 2019. Given that Tesla is about 5% of all autos in the US, I would expect tesla deaths to be about 12,000 deaths in that period, or 5%.
Are so few people using autopilot? Shouldn’t the autopilot death toll be something closer to the 2000 deaths per year one would expect statistically from Tesla Drivers?
Is autopilot much safer than human drivers? Is it more dangerous?
Is Autopilot + Attentive safer than just attentive?
Is the 40k deaths per year not something that should be considered simply because people stop thinking of so many deaths as a tragedy and just think of it as a statistic?
Is the outrage and focus on car self driving just an extension of human phobia of technology and articles allow for people to have anecdotal confirmation bias?