Federal safety regulators have opened an investigation into Ford’s hands-free driver assistance system, BlueCruise, after it was active in two recent stationary-vehicle crashes that killed several people.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) said Monday that it had confirmed that BlueCruise was active in both crashes. One took place in February in Texas and the other in early April in Pennsylvania. These are the first known deaths resulting from accidents involving the use of BlueCruise.
The investigation into the two crashes is intensifying scrutiny of BlueCruise, 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 opened an investigation into the crash in Texas. Ford did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The new investigation comes just days after ODI closed its most high-profile driver assistance investigation to date into Tesla’s Autopilot. The safety agency initially opened this investigation in 2021 after several reports of Teslas crashing into stationary emergency vehicles while the drivers were using Autopilot. In closing the investigation, ODI said last week it had determined that a “critical safety gap between drivers’ expectations of (Autopilot’s) operating capabilities and the system’s actual capabilities” created “a poor predictable use and avoidable accidents.
Ford announced BlueCruise in 2021. It’s only available on pre-mapped highways, and Ford pairs it with a camera-based driver monitoring system that checks whether the driver’s eyes are still on the road when the system is active. This represents much tighter constraints on the system than those imposed by Tesla on the use of Autopilot. But while it’s highly praised by some, including Consumer Reports, recent crashes and resulting investigations suggest there may be a more fundamental problem with advanced driver assistance systems than some these companies are not ready to admit it.
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