Federal safety officials are looking into Ford’s BlueCruise hands-free driving assistance system after it was used in two recent crashes into stationary cars that killed several people.
ODI, which is part of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, stated on Monday that BlueCruise was involved in both accidents. One was in Texas in February, and the other was in Pennsylvania in early April. These people are the first known to have died in crashes involving BlueCruise.
BlueCruise is now offered on the Mustang Mach-E and some Ford F-150s, including the Lightning, Explorers, and Expeditions. The investigations into the two crashes have made people pay even more attention to it. The Texas crash is already being looked into by the National Transportation Safety Board. In a statement, Ford said that it is “working with NHTSA to support its investigation.”
Odi just finished its most publicized driver aid investigation to date, which was into Tesla’s Autopilot. The new investigation comes just a few days after that. The first time the safety agency looked into this was in 2021, when several Teslas were reported to have crashed into parked emergency vehicles while the drivers were using Autopilot. ODI concluded last week that there was a “critical safety gap between drivers’ expectations of [Autopilot’s] operating capabilities and the system’s true capabilities,” which led to “foreseeable misuse and avoidable crashes.”
Ford said BlueCruise would come out in 2021. It’s only available on routes that have already been mapped out, and Ford pairs it with a camera-based system that checks drivers’ eyes to see if they are still on the road while the system is running. Those are a lot stricter rules for the system than the ones Tesla has for Autopilot. Some publications, like Consumer Reports, give it good marks, but recent crashes and the investigations that followed suggest there may be a bigger problem with these systems than some of the companies that make them are willing to admit.
Ford has replied to this story, which has been updated.
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