Federal investigators from the NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation are probing Comma.ai after five reported crashes tied to its aftermarket hands-off driver assistance tech, including two fatal collisions that killed three people and left as many as 11 others injured. The crashes share a common pattern: devices failed to detect or respond to slow or stopped vehicles in the same lane. Regulators say some incidents involved forked or modified versions of Comma.ai’s open-source software, and the probe focuses on how the hardware and software interact with vehicle Adaptive Cruise Control and Automated Lane Centering systems. Comma.ai’s founder George Hotz has stepped back from daily operations since 2022; the company’s openpilot system uses camera-based driver monitoring and explicitly warns drivers they must remain ready to retake control.
One identified fatal crash occurred in February 2026 in Ascension Parish, Louisiana, when a 2022 Toyota RAV4 running a third-party fork called FrogPilot struck an unoccupied, marked Gonzales Police Department vehicle stopped with emergency lights; two rear-seat passengers in the RAV4 died. The NHTSA has not publicly matched the other fatal report to a specific incident yet. The situation echoes past probes into Tesla and Ford systems, underlining a persistent ADAS weakness with stationary or stopped vehicles and limits on abrupt deceleration and acceleration built into openpilot’s ACC performance.
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