That’s what happened recently when the owner of a Tesla Model X, the SUV model, crashed his vehicle into a building and claimed the car had accelerated on its own. An analysis of the data sent from the car to Tesla headquarters via an Internet connection revealed that, in fact, the car’s acceleration was the product of the accelerator pedal being pushed down 100 percent after the car had been traveling at 6 mph. The car had simply performed as instructed, the company claims.
A report by MIT Technology Review suggests that this type of data-backed analysis is to become the norm among auto makers, and resolving insurance disputes following collisions will become less a matter of "he-said, she-said"’ and more a process of looking at data logs and video files collected by the machines. A majority of cars sold in the U.S. today have black boxes, data recorders that can be examined in the event of a collision, the publication reports. Scientific study of this event indicates that even crude black boxes drastically reduce the incidence of crashes.
