Tesla’s Triple Gift From NHTSA: No Blame In Crash, No Recall, Great Safety Results

Elon Musk must be feeling pretty pleased right about now. A long-awaited National Highway Traffic Safety Administration review of a fatal accident that occurred in May 2016 has concluded the driver’s Tesla Model S, which was in self-driving “Autopilot” mode at the time of the crash, was not defective. As such, the federal agency will not seek a recall of Tesla vehicles. And in what’s surely a rarity, rather than hurt the case for Autopilot, the data NHTSA pulled from Tesla actually makes a pretty compelling argument in its favor. Statistically, the government agency found Teslas (both Model S and Model X) with the Autopilot installed crashed about 40 percent less often than their purely human-driven counterparts.