Sunday also marks the one-year anniversary of Tesla's Autopilot-related fatality. On May 7, 2016, Joshua Brown was killed when his Model S collided with a tractor-trailer near Williston, Florida, while using Autopilot. In January, the NHTSA cleared Tesla of wrongdoing in the crash. The final report noted that the car's technology was not yet fully autonomous and that due to the perpendicular nature of the crash and the speed, Autopilot's sensors were not provided adequate time to detect the hazard.
Still, the crash was a controversial moment for a company whose CEO Elon Musk has said that one of the fundamental purposes of autonomous vehicles is to decrease driver fatalities and accidents overall. Since the crash, Tesla has navigated safety concerns and continued to move toward its goal of a driverless future. The year since the crash has seen Tesla's competitors launch aggressive efforts at autonomy and regulators at the state and federal level adopt formal guidelines for testing.
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