The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has initiated a preliminary investigation into Ford Motor Company’s hands-free driving technology, BlueCruise. This decision follows two incidents involving Mustang Mach-E cars colliding with stationary vehicles, resulting in at least one fatality each. The collisions took place during nighttime lighting conditions, prompting the NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation to look into BlueCruise’s engagement moments before the accidents occurred.
The NHTSA’s evaluation will focus on the performance of the BlueCruise system in dynamic driving tasks and driver monitoring. As of now, Ford Motor (F) has not issued a statement regarding the investigation. In a separate development, the NHTSA has recently launched an investigation into the adequacy of Tesla’s recall of over 2 million vehicles to install new Autopilot safeguards. This investigation covers various Tesla models equipped with Autopilot produced between 2012 and 2024.
The decision to investigate Tesla’s recall was made following concerns raised by crash events post-software update installations and preliminary tests conducted by the NHTSA. Meanwhile, Ford Motor (F) shares were observed to be up 0.39% in premarket trading on the day the investigation was announced.