Joshua Brown, a 40-year-old Tesla Model S driver, was killed in May 2016 when his car's Autopilot system failed to distinguish a white tractor-trailer from a bright sky and drove under the trailer at 74 mph, making this the first known fatality involving a self-driving car.
On May 7, 2016, Joshua Brown, a 40-year-old former Navy SEAL and technology company owner from Ohio, was killed in Williston, Florida when his 2015 Tesla Model S collided with a tractor-trailer while the Autopilot system was engaged. The Tesla's cameras failed to distinguish the white side of the turning truck from the brightly lit sky, and neither the car nor the driver applied the brakes. The car was traveling at 74 mph when it passed under the trailer, with the bottom of the trailer impacting the windshield and shearing off the car's roof completely. Brown had been using Autopilot for 37 minutes out of his 37-minute trip, with his hands detected on the wheel for only 25 seconds total, despite receiving seven visual warnings. The car continued traveling 910 feet after the collision before coming to rest against a telephone pole. Brown was pronounced dead at the scene. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and National Transportation Safety Board both investigated the crash, with NHTSA ultimately concluding that Tesla's Autopilot system was not defective and estimating it reduces crash likelihood by 40 percent.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
AI systems that fail to perform reliably or effectively under varying conditions, exposing them to errors and failures that can have significant consequences, especially in critical applications or areas that require moral reasoning.
AI system
Due to a decision or action made by an AI system
Unintentional
Due to an unexpected outcome from pursuing a goal
Post-deployment
Occurring after the AI model has been trained and deployed