The U.S. announced on Thursday the 40-year-old owner of a technology company who nicknamed his vehicle “Tessy” and had praised its sophisticated “autopilot” system just one month earlier for preventing a collision on an interstate.
The government said it is investigating the design and performance of the system aboard the Tesla Model S sedan.
Joshua D. Brown, of Canton, Ohio, died in the accident May 7 in Williston, Florida, when his car’s cameras failed to distinguish the white side of a turning tractor-trailer from a brightly lit sky and didn’t automatically activate its brakes, according to government records obtained on Thursday. The first fatality in a wreck involving a car in self-driving mode could hurt sentiment on autonomous cars.
‘He was watching a movie’ Frank Baressi, 62, the driver of the truck and owner of Okemah Express LLC, said the Tesla driver was “playing Harry Potter on the TV screen” at the time of the crash and driving so quickly that “he went so fast through my trailer I didn’t see him.”
“It was still playing when he died and snapped a telephone pole a quarter mile down the road,” Baressi said. He acknowledged he couldn’t see the movie, only heard it.
Tesla Motors Inc. said it is not possible to watch videos on the Model S touch screen. There was no reference to the movie in initial police reports.
Brown’s published obituary described him as a member of the Navy SEALs for 11 years and founder of Nexu Innovations Inc., working on wireless Internet networks and camera systems. In Washington, the Pentagon confirmed Brown’s work with the SEALs and said he left the service in 2008.
Brown was an enthusiastic booster of his 2015 Tesla Model S and in April credited its sophisticated Autopilot system for avoiding a crash when a commercial truck swerved into his lane on an interstate.
He published a video of the incident online. “Hands down the best car I have ever owned and use it to its full extent,” Brown wrote.
Tesla didn’t identify Brown but described him as “a friend to Tesla and the broader EV [electric vehicle] community.”
