Federal safety regulators have opened one research on Ford’s hands-free driver assistance system, BlueCruise, after it was active during two recent crashes involving stationary vehicles that killed multiple people.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Office of Injury Investigation (ODI) said Monday it confirmed BlueCruise was active in both crashes. One took place in February in Texas and the other in early April in Pennsylvania. They are the first known deaths resulting from accidents involving the use of BlueCruise.
The investigation into the two crashes strengthens BlueCruise control, which is currently available on the Mustang Mach-E, and some Ford F-150s (including the Lightning), Explorers and Expeditions. The National Transportation Safety Board has already launched an investigation into the Texas crash. Ford said in a statement that it is “working with NHTSA to support its investigation.”
The new investigation comes just days after ODI closed the most high-profile driver assistance investigation to date into Tesla’s Autopilot. The safety agency originally opened this investigation in 2021 after multiple reports of Teslas crashing into stationary emergency vehicles while drivers were using Autopilot. Concluding the investigation, the ODI said last week it had identified a “critical safety gap between drivers’ expectations of [Autopilot’s] the system’s operational capabilities and actual capabilities” created “foreseeable misuse and avoidable errors.”
Ford announced BlueCruise in 2021. It’s only available on pre-mapped highways, and Ford is pairing it with a camera-based driver monitoring system that checks whether drivers’ eyes are still on the road when the system is active. These represent much tighter restrictions on the system than Tesla places on the use of Autopilot. But while it is highly rated by some, including Consumer Reportsrecent accidents and the resulting investigations suggest that there may be a more fundamental problem with advanced driver assistance systems than some of these companies are willing to admit.
This story has been updated to include a response from Ford.
