The National Transportation Safety Board today slammed both Tesla Inc. and Apple Inc. in relation to a fatal accident in 2018 involving a Tesla Model X operated by an Apple employee.

The board made the comments while handing down its final report into the accident after two years of investigation. The report, while noting that the operator of the vehicle was playing a mobile game and not paying attention to the road at the time of the accident, criticized Tesla for inadequate driver monitoring and issues with Tesla’s Autopilot system as well.

In terms of driver distraction, the report found that the Tesla Autopilot system did not provide an effective means of monitoring the driver’s level of engagement and that alerts in place were insufficient to elicit a response to prevent the crash or mitigate its severity. “Tesla needs to develop applications that more effectively sense the driver’s level of engagement and that alert drivers who are not engaged,” the report noted.

The report attacked Autopilot on two fronts. The first is that Autopilot is being used by drivers outside the vehicle’s operational design domain and, despite knowing this, Tesla does not restrict where Autopilot can be used.

The second part found that Autopilot’s crash avoidance assist systems were not designed to and hence did not detect the crash attenuator. In not detecting the risk, the vehicle is said to have accelerated and did not provide an alert, and the emergency braking didn’t activate. “For partial driving automation systems to be safely deployed in a high-speed operating environment, collision avoidance systems must be able to effectively detect potential hazards and warn of potential hazards to drivers,” the report stated.

Apple was specifically targeted over the fact that the victim was using his iPhone at the time of the crash, with the board criticizing the company for failing to have a company policy that bans the nonemergency use of portable electronic devices while driving. All portable electronic device manufacturers were called on to develop a distracted-driver lock-out mechanism or application that would automatically disable any driver-distracting functions when a vehicle is in motion.

“In this crash we saw an over-reliance on technology, we saw distraction, we saw a lack of policy prohibiting cell phone use while driving and we saw infrastructure failures, which, when combined, led to this tragic loss,” NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt said at the end of the hearing.

Tesla has yet to respond to the findings and surprisingly founder and Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk also didn’t comment on Twitter, instead posting multiple pictures of ice cream. Tesla shares fell 4% in regular trading, to $799.91, on another broad down day for the overall market, before dropping 1% more after-hours.

Image: NTSB