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Did you know that your new car, truck, or SUV is equipped with a small computer that is recording your every driving action as well as data on your vehicle’s condition every time you drove it? If you didn’t, you know now! Today’s post is a “good news” and “bad news” report on a recent National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) decision to withdraw its 2012 proposal regarding the installation of Event Data Recorders (EDRs or, as they are better…

The automated driving / “driverless vehicle” industry in general, and its bright and shining star Tesla in particular, have been having a rough go of it in the media. It is thus understandable that any “good” news will be highly publicized and the “bad” news ignored or at least downplayed. In one of our previous posts we briefly questioned Tesla’s interpretation of a puzzling statement made by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NTSB) claiming that Tesla’s highly-touted ” Autopilot/Autosteer”…

A few days ago we published a blog post with the title ” FAA Orders Grounding of Boeing 737 Max-Aircraft”. In that post we speculated that, based on information available in the news media, the crashes of both Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302may have involved a failure in the design of the flight control system installed in Boeing’s 737 Max 8 aircraft. Since our post, we have learned that other sources indicate that we were on…

The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) defines an “autonomous,” or “automated” vehicle to be “… those in which at least some aspects of a safety-critical control function (e.g., steering, acceleration, or braking) occur without direct driver input.” The NHTSA and the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) classify automated driving systems (ADSs) into one of six “levels” (where Level 0 is “warning only” and Level 6 is “fully automatic/no driver required”). Since only ADSs classified as Level 0 – 2…

There were three fatal accidents within a six-month period involving aircraft manufactured by Boeing. Two of those accidents occurred during passenger operations and both involved “low hours” aircraft from the company’s best-selling 737 line. The third accident occurred during an air cargo operation and involved an older, “high hours,” 767 model that originally entered service as a passenger aircraft but had been refitted for air cargo. Lion Air 610 29 October, 2018 Lion Air 610, a Boeing 737 Max 8…