Last week, a fatal crash involving a Tesla using the company’s Autopilot feature resulted in the death of three people near Newport Beach, California — a tragedy which prompted the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to add the incident to its growing list of over 30 investigations involving the EV company’s “beta” self-driving mode.
Instead of, say, pausing a program that Tesla itself admits still needs a lot of work, the company is quite literally pushing on the accelerator pedal — using a new software update this week to raise the max speed of Autopilot for owners from 80 to 85 mph. The increase comes nearly a year after Elon Musk’s empire announced its “Tesla Vision” Autopilot program, which transitioned away from radar data to only utilizing camera-derived information.
