(The Epoch Times)—Tesla’s Autopilot system has contributed to at least 467 vehicle crashes, with 14 resulting in deaths and many others that caused serious injuries, according to federal authorities who say there is a “critical safety gap” in the technology.
The U.S. Department of Transportation is investigating Tesla’s December 2023 recall, which pulled more than 2 million vehicles from the road, to determine whether the company’s updates to its Autopilot driving systems were sufficient in preventing driver distractions. The department analyzed 956 crashes that were alleged to involve the automaker’s driver assistance technology.
The department’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on April 26 posted documents to its website that suggest an additional 20 crashes occurred since Tesla’s recall, concerning investigators. The more than 2 million vehicles that Tesla recalled represent nearly all the vehicles that Tesla had sold at that point.
Tesla’s December 2023 recall affected all of its vehicles with Autopilot or driver assistance systems. This includes Tesla’s Model 3, Model X, Model S, and Model Y cars, as well as its Cybertruck. The Autopilot’s driver monitoring systems are supposed to detect the force from drivers’ hands on the steering wheel and send alerts when they are absent.
The safety administration asked the automaker to recall its vehicles after a two-year investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot system. Specifically, the agency probed multiple instances of Teslas crashing into roadside emergency vehicles while using the Autopilot systems.
The automaker said the “prominence and scope of the system’s controls may be insufficient to prevent driver misuse.”
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on April 26 said its two-year investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot system was done to find any problems with the technology that “created an unreasonable risk” to driver and vehicle safety, and “involved extensive crash analysis, vehicle evaluations, and assessment of vehicle control authority and driver engagement technologies.”
The administration’s Office of Detects Investigation found 13 crashes that involved one or more fatalities and several others that caused serious injuries in which “foreseeable driver misuse” of the Autopilot system played a key role.
For owners of vehicles that use driver assistance technology, Tesla sent an online software update to increase driver warnings, including when a driver’s hands leave the steering wheel. The agency found 20 additional crashes after Tesla sent the update.
Tesla also stated that the solution requires the driver to opt in but allows the driver to reverse the fail-safe, according to the agency.
Autopilot Allegedly Kills Motorcyclist
A 2022 Tesla Model S using the Autopilot driving system was allegedly linked to a motorcyclist’s death in Seattle, Washington, on April 19.
The vehicle owner told a Washington State Patrol trooper after the crash that he was using the driver assistance technology while looking at his phone and driving the car.
“The next thing he knew there was a bang and the vehicle lurched forward as it accelerated and collided with the motorcycle in front of him,” the police officer wrote in the affidavit.
The trooper arrested the 56-year-old driver for investigation of vehicular homicide after the driver said he was using the Autopilot mode while operating the car inattentively and using his cell phone as it moved forward, “putting trust in the machine to drive for him,” according to the document.
Authorities found the motorcyclist, Jeffrey Nissen, 28, underneath the car, and he was pronounced dead at the scene.
However, authorities are still investigating the crash and have not verified whether the driver was using Autopilot at the time of the incident.
The federal agency probing Tesla said it was looking for defects in Autopilot’s driver monitoring system, which is supposed to alert drivers when their hands are no longer touching the steering wheel. Some experts have alleged that the monitoring system is defective and have also criticized its limitations during night driving.
Teslas have cameras to monitor drivers on the road, but they do not possess night vision capabilities, and Autopilot is still operable when the cameras are covered.
The initial investigation began in 2021 after 11 reports surfaced of Teslas striking parked emergency vehicles while using Autopilot. Between June 8, 2022, and April 25, the Autopilot system caused 467 crashes and 14 fatalities.
Tesla said that both of its driver assistance systems—Autopilot and the advanced “Full Self Driving”—cannot drive themselves, despite the choice of the name.
The latter technology was linked to 75 crashes and one death, according to the investigation.
Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk previously promised a fleet of robotaxis driven with “Full Self Driving” to create revenue for both the company and the vehicles’ owners, as they can operate as taxis when they’d normally be parked. The cars are still being tested and have faced years of delays after Mr. Musk said they would be ready by 2020.
The company says drivers must always be ready to take control of the wheel when using Autopilot or “Full Self Driving” and that they do not give the vehicle complete autonomous control.
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The Epoch Times has reached out to Tesla for comment. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.