Regulators Investigating Ford for Fatal Accidents Involving Self-Driving Feature

Ford Motor (F) shares lost ground Monday as federal regulators announced they have opened an investigation into fatal accidents related to the carmaker’s hands-free self-driving feature.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said that its Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) was looking into two crashes involving Ford’s Mustang Mach-E electric vehicles that caused three fatalities.

Officials say the two vehicles had the company’s BlueCruise hands-free driver-assist system engaged prior to the collisions with stationary vehicles. They noted both incidents this year happened at night, within the travel lanes of controlled-access highways. Reports said that the crashes occurred in San Antonio and Philadelphia.

NHTSA pointed out that BlueCruise is part of Ford’s Co-Pilot360 Active 2.0 package, which has “a suite of driver assistance technologies including partial driving automation features that provide lane and speed maintenance with the expectation that the driver actively supervises the system’s performance.” It added that BlueCruise is only available on certain roadways, and uses a camera-based driver monitoring system to determine driver attentiveness. 

Officials said the ODI will evaluate BlueCruise’s performance of the dynamic driving task and driver monitoring. 

In an email to Investopedia, Ford said it was “working with NHTSA to support its investigation.”

Ford shares were down 1% to $12.66 at about 3:10 p.m. ET. With Monday’s losses, the stock has risen about 4% in 2024.