Safety failure
Realized harm
Tesla on Autopilot struck a Freightliner parked across a Pennsylvania Turnpike lane for traffic control
AIR-2023-0014 AIR record · 2023-06-tesla-autopilot-pa-turnpike-truck
A real party was affected. This incident caused actual consequences, not a demonstrated capability.
From the supporting source
Police said the driver of the Tesla lost control while the vehicle was on autopilot.post-gazette.com
The record
Disclosed
2023-06-26
Occurred
2023-06-23
Vendor
Tesla
Product
Tesla Autopilot
Risk domain
Agent behaviour › Unsafe actuation
System type
Classical autonomy (no generative model)
Who acted
Agent acted — Autopilot drove into the parked truck
Attack surface
Autonomous operations
Autonomy level
Semi-autonomous
Initial vector
None autonomous action
Impact type
Property damage
Confidence
High
Submitted by
EAI Internal
Crosswalk
- OWASP Agentic Top 10 (2026)
- ASI01 – Agent Goal Hijack
- MITRE ATLAS
- AML.T0048 – External Harms
- NIST AI RMF
- MEASURE 2.6; MANAGE 1.3
- EU AI Act
- Annex III §1(c)
- ISO/IEC
- TR 24028; 24029-1; 23894
- AIUC-1
- C. Safety
- Scope
- agent misuse
- Mitigation
- Require confirmation for destructive actions; Implement dry-run modes; Use layered safety controls.
- Taxonomy
- Enkrypt AI agent risk taxonomy · Black-Box Red Teaming of Agentic AI: A Taxonomy-Driven Framework for Automated Risk Discovery
Blast radius
two vehicles; no injuries; driver charged with careless driving
Capability abused
Defense & remediation
Recorded defense
driver supervision requirement
Guardrail kinds
Human supervision
Guardrail outcome
Silent
Fix shipped
none attributed
Taxonomy & references
Curator notes
Third stationary-obstacle Autopilot record in the corpus, and the repetition is the finding: large, lit, stationary objects blocking a lane recur as a failure mode across years. Liability landed entirely on the human driver, who was charged, which is the accountability pattern supervised autonomy produces. AI Incident Database incident 560.
Supporting sources
Cite as
Enkrypt AI. "Tesla on Autopilot struck a Freightliner parked across a Pennsylvania Turnpike lane for traffic control". AIR, AIR-2023-0014. https://agentincident.vercel.app/i/AIR-2023-0014/ (accessed 2026-10-19).