IIHS report raises safety concerns about vehicles with automated assist features.

NBC Nightly News (8/7, story 6, 1:45, Holt, 7.51M) reports that a new report released Tuesday is “raising safety concerns about vehicles with automated assist features, including the autopilot function already available on some newer models.” The new Insurance Institute For Highway Safety (IIHS) report “warned that electronic driver assistance systems may not see stopped vehicles, and may lead you into a crash if you’re not careful.” Of the five models tested, “the group found two of the Teslas, Model S and Model Three, hit a stationary balloon when they had adaptive cruise control on.”

        The AP (8/7, Krisher) reports that IIHS “said on the road, the institute’s engineers found that all the vehicles but Tesla’s Model 3 failed to respond to stopped vehicles ahead of them.” IIHS’ Chief Research Officer David Zuby said, “We have found situations where the vehicles under semi-automated control may do things that can put you and your passengers at risk, and so you really need to be on top of it to prevent that from happening.” Zuby “said IIHS is developing ratings for driver assist systems and eventually will make recommendations on regulations for fully autonomous vehicles”

        The Hill (8/7, Keller, 2.71M) reports that “researchers expressed caution about the viability of testing self-driving vehicles on real roads, pointing to the incident last March when a self-driving Uber prototype hit and killed a pedestrian.” The report said, “The Uber crash in Arizona that took the life of a pedestrian in March shows the hazards of beta testing self-driving vehicles on public roads.”

        Citing the IIHS report, Bloomberg News (8/7, Gardner, 4.46M) says that “the Uber Technologies Inc. self-driving test vehicle that killed a pedestrian in Arizona earlier this year may have been able to avoid the crash had the ride-hailing company not disabled Volvo Cars’ safety system.” The report “criticizes Uber for turning off Volvo’s collision-avoidance technology in the XC90 sport utility vehicle that struck and killed a woman in Tempe on March 18.”

        The story was reported similarly by NBC News (8/7, Eisenstein, 5.76M), CBS News (8/7, Van Cleave, 6.78M), Digital Trends (8/7, Edelstein, 472K), and Business Insider (8/7, Ma, 5.65M)