A Tesla Model S car killed a 28-year-old motorcyclist in the Seattle area in April and police found out that it was in “Full Self-Driving” mode when it hit the motorcyclist.  It is at least the second fatal accident involving the technology on which Tesla CEO is pinning his hopes. On his admission that he was looking at his cell phone while using the driver assistant feature, the 56-year-old driver was arrested on suspicion of vehicular homicide, police said in a statement. Tesla maintains that its “Full Self-Driving (Supervised)” software needs active driver supervision and does not make vehicles autonomous.

Earlier, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said there was lone fatal accident involving a Tesla vehicle using FSD software between August 2022 and August 2023. The NHTSA has now informed that it “is aware of this crash and is gathering information from local law enforcement and Tesla.” The case remains under police investigation. Experts maintain there are limitations to Tesla’s technology dependent on artificial intelligence and cameras. Tesla’s competitors such as Alphabet’s Waymo also uses costly sensors like lidars to detect the driving environment.

Guidehouse Insights analyst Sam Abuelsamid said, “There are so many things that can go wrong” with Tesla’s camera-only system. Giving an example he said that Tesla’s system can inaccurately measure how far away an object is. “It is extremely challenging to collect and curate data from all sorts of real-world elements such as motorcycles and bicycles in the broad range of possible weather, lightning, road and traffic conditions,” said Raj Rajkumar (a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University).

This year, Musk abandoned Tesla’s all-new affordable cars and augmented his bets on self-driving vehicles, saying he will be stunned if Tesla cannot attain full self-driving capability next year. Speaking in an interview Musk said that a future vehicle will be like a “tiny mobile lounge” where drivers will have the liberty of watching movies, playing video games, working and even drinking and sleeping.

Musk has been aiming to develop self-driving capability for several years, with the technology under mounting regulatory and legal scrutiny. The NHTSA launched a probe of Autopilot in August 2021 after identifying over a dozen crashes in which Tesla vehicles had hit stationary emergency vehicles, and reviewed hundreds of crashes involving Autopilot. Tesla was forced to recall almost all its vehicles on U.S. roads to add safeguards to the software, way back in December 2023.