A Ford engineer and her husband were driving their new F-150 pickup in May when something went terribly wrong. The engineer told Ford they were using Ford’s hands-free driving system, BlueCruise, which puts computers in charge of the truck’s speed and steering.
Just outside downtown Toledo, Ohio, on I-75, Seetaram Palepu tapped the brakes to slow as he merged onto an exit ramp. But instead, the truck accelerated. It smashed into a guardrail, rolled over and came to a stop upside down. The Palepus had to be extracted by emergency workers, according to the bodycam footage of responding officers.
The truck, Palepu later said in a court filing, “went out of control.”
Ford is a leader in the industrywide push to automate driving. Its BlueCruise driving system promises to keep a car in its lane, manage its speed and slow it down upon approaching another vehicle, without the driver’s hands on the steering wheel.
More than two million Ford cars and trucks in 2025 were equipped with the technology or some of its elements, and Chief Executive Jim Farley said the automaker sees a lot of potential in developing an even more advanced automated driving system that allows for “eyes off” driving.
But some drivers have found the technology behind BlueCruise confusing to use, according to driver statements, crash reports and Ford’s research. Some haven’t understood the product’s limitations, while others haven’t heeded the system’s warnings to take control of the car—or haven’t had time to.
Ford has long known about the dangers. Confidential company documents from 2018-19, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, show Ford learned while developing BlueCruise that some drivers didn’t understand how to use certain features, stopped paying attention to the road or failed to respond to warnings to retake control.
Ford told the Journal it took steps to improve BlueCruise before rolling it out, such as by refining graphics on the vehicle dashboard and the messaging used to alert drivers, “to further improve the driver’s understanding of their responsibility.”
The full BlueCruise product, which allows hands-free driving, was released in 2021, although some features of the system, such as lane centering and adaptive cruise control, were available earlier.
But after two deadly crashes in 2024, federal regulators are looking into whether the technology is still posing problems for drivers.
Since 2021, Ford has reported to U.S. regulators 32 crashes, including three that were fatal, in which the company’s automated driving technology was suspected to be engaged at the time of the collision, according to federal data.
Ford told the Journal it has built extensive safeguards into BlueCruise to ensure drivers use it correctly and are ready to resume control of the vehicle, including an eye-tracking camera that will alert drivers if they look away from the road.
Customer feedback and company research haven’t found any signs that drivers find the technology confusing since it launched, the automaker said. If drivers pay attention, Ford’s automated-driving technology is safer than driving unassisted, the company said.
“We have safely enabled more than half a billion miles of travel by helping drivers remain engaged,” Ford said.
Automating driving has proven challenging for many companies. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the top auto-safety regulator in the U.S., is probing Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system and the driverless robotaxis operated by Alphabet-owned Waymo. Waymo said it would cooperate with NHTSA.
After two cars using Ford’s BlueCruise hit stopped cars in 2024, NHTSA began investigating fatal crashes involving the system. The agency said it has received more than 2,000 reports from drivers saying they experienced an issue with BlueCruise or Ford’s other automated-driving features.
NHTSA said last year that “system limitations” detecting stationary vehicles while driving at night and at highway speeds appeared to be factors in the collisions it was investigating and several near misses.
Ford said to the Journal that roughly three dozen of the 2,000 reports to NHTSA involved crashes, of which nine involved the hands-free BlueCruise feature.
Padmalaya Palepu, the Ford engineer who was in the truck’s passenger seat while her husband drove, told Ford her husband had tried disabling BlueCruise before the crash because their 2025 F-150 pickup started drifting out of its lane, but the system wouldn’t turn off, according to the initial report Ford submitted to NHTSA relaying Padmalaya’s claims.
Later, the company told NHTSA that data from the vehicle showed Seetaram had turned off the F-150’s cruise control before colliding with the guardrail and had fully compressed the gas pedal.
Neither BlueCruise nor the cruise-control function were active during the 20 seconds prior to the crash, Ford said to the Journal. “Any confusion involved in the accident was related to the driver’s pedal application and not the BlueCruise or” cruise-control system, Ford said.
Padmalaya Palepu, whose LinkedIn says she is an analytical design manager at the automaker, declined to comment through Ford, and Seetaram Palepu didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Both Seetaram and Padmalaya were treated at a hospital after the crash. Seetaram required surgery and wore a neck brace, according to court records and police filings.
Police issued Seetaram a traffic ticket for failing to control the vehicle. In late May, he told a Toledo court he wanted to contest the citation because of the F-150’s driving technology. “Accident happened as the vehicle went out of control, due to cruise-control malfunction,” he said in a court filing. He later paid a fine for a reduced charge, records show.
NHTSA declined to comment on the Palepu incident because of the ongoing investigation. Jonathan Morrison, the agency’s administrator, said at a January conference that drivers should know they need to remain in the loop when using these systems. “We want to be crystal clear that the systems available in today’s vehicles are driver assistance systems: you’re driving,” he said.
‘Common areas of confusion’
Since Tesla released its Autopilot system in 2015, carmakers have been locked in a fierce arms race to advance automated-driving technology. Many have sought to proceed in steps; they’ve rolled out automating braking, advanced cruise control and, for some, hands-free driving. Some aim to develop cars that would drive themselves—technology that currently is mostly limited to robotaxis operating in several cities.
Ford spent years saying partially automated systems were too much of a challenge, because drivers must remain attentive and ready to assume control of the wheel, and executives said some drivers can become complacent while using the technology.
But amid the technical challenges and costs behind making full self-driving technology, Ford refocused in the late-2010s on developing a driver-assistance system controlling steering and speed—the product that eventually became BlueCruise.
In June 2018, Ford launched a benchmarking study using driver-assistance technology from General Motors. Ford looked at its rival’s technology to determine a design direction for its own system, according to a company presentation.
Ford enlisted more than 40 people to drive a 2018 Cadillac CT6 with GM’s Super Cruise along a highway near Grand Rapids, Mich., and asked them about the experience. Their responses confirmed the company’s earlier misgivings: “Drivers worry they will be too complacent or lazy behind the wheel with the system active (worry about themselves and others),” the presentation said.
The presentation is among test reports, prototype studies and other documents that Ford submitted to NHTSA in response to the agency’s BlueCruise investigation. The documents are available to the public with redactions. The Journal reviewed hundreds of pages of the documents without the redactions.
After the test drives were completed, Ford identified a lengthy list of “common areas of confusion and concern” while using GM’s automated-driving system.
If the technology’s auto-steering fails and veers the car out of a lane, drivers are supposed to grab the wheel and reposition it. Yet one-in-four drivers incorrectly believed Super Cruise would handle the function, the presentation said.
Also, 80% failed to notice an initial flashing green light warning drivers to resume control of the wheel. Drivers later noticed additional warnings.
A GM spokeswoman told the Journal that references to the 2018 study don’t “reflect our current system or the familiarity customers now have with hands-free technology,” adding that the GM system “has been validated across 800 million real-world miles.”
In a 2019 study of its own developing product, in which Ford sent drivers along a stretch of Highway 101 in California, the company found more than half the drivers failed to engage the correct adaptive cruise-control button, and 60% of drivers incorrectly believed the technology would reposition the vehicle if it veered out of a lane. “It’s still not clear to the driver that they are responsible for steering the (vehicle) back into the lane,” a presentation about the study, reviewed by the Journal, said.
When Ford simulated an event that required drivers to take control of the wheel, 10% of them didn’t respond to the initial warning prompts from the system, according to the presentation.
The study, however, showed that novice users quickly improved their understanding of the system’s functionality, Ford said. Nearly 100% of subjects in pre-launch testing demonstrated an “understanding of critical components of the driver assistance features after a single drive session,” the company said.
Based on the findings, Ford said it made improvements to the system before launching the first product named BlueCruise in 2021.
‘Black thing’ in the road
In September 2021, Barry Wooten was killed in a collision in Forsyth, Ga., after losing control of his F-150 truck in “self-driving mode,” according to a report the driver’s family filed with NHTSA.
Wooten’s family said in court filings he was using elements of the BlueCruise system at the time of the incident. The family has filed a personal-injury lawsuit against Ford.
Wooten spent his entire life in the car business, said his daughter, Wendy Wells. He was a national director of service and parts at a Georgia auto dealer chain that sold Ford cars, among other brands. “Dad wanted the first of everything,” she said. “He wanted the first new body style Corvette. He loved technology and having the latest and greatest.”
While driving on a highway in Georgia, Barry Wooten’s F-150 plotted a path for it to drive off-road as he attempted to take an exit ramp, the family said in court documents.
Based on GPS location and data taken from the car at the time of impact, Wooten didn’t have enough time to realize the truck wasn’t properly making the exit and to take control of the vehicle, the family’s filings said.
Ford said it doesn’t comment on pending litigation. Lawyers for the Wooten family declined to comment because of the pending case.
In a report to NHTSA that covered several incidents, Ford said Wooten’s F-150 was “not equipped with the operating system necessary to make BlueCruise functional,” meaning it didn’t have the feature that allowed hands-free driving. In other documents, Ford refers to the kind of technology equipped on Wooten’s F-150 as “hands-on” BlueCruise.
“Ford’s assessment of this incident is that the subject system performed as designed and that there was no failure of the subject system in the subject crash,” the company said in another report.
In 2024, on a February night, an all-electric Ford Mustang Mach-E SUV driving on a highway in San Antonio struck the rear of a Honda CR-V that was stopped in a traffic lane, according to police and federal crash reports.
The Ford driver told police he didn’t have time to react after he “saw a black thing” in the road moments before the crash, the federal crash report said. The driver also said the Honda was at a “complete stop with no lights on” at the time, the police report said.
The Honda overturned, and the impact was so severe the Honda’s driver was fatally injured.
Ford said in a report to NHTSA that BlueCruise was engaged at the time but that warnings to take control of the wheel were ignored for 30 seconds prior to the collision.
One night a couple of weeks later, in March 2024, another Mustang Mach-E owner using BlueCruise in a construction zone on a Pennsylvania highway slammed into a stationary Hyundai Elantra sedan. The impact pushed the Elantra into a Toyota Prius, and both the Prius and Elantra drivers died at the scene.
The Prius and Elantra appeared to have been involved in an earlier collision, a crash report said. The cars were in the highway’s left lane, and the Prius driver was standing next to the Elantra. As the Elantra driver began exiting the vehicle, the Mustang Mach-E slammed into the car, according to the Mustang’s camera and other information.
Police later charged the Ford driver with vehicular homicide and found she was drunk at the time of the collision.
Based on images from the Mustang’s system, Ford said in a report to NHTSA the driver may have been attempting to defeat the eye-tracking camera with an electronic device and had ignored warnings for nearly 30 seconds before the crash.
The Ford driver pleaded not guilty, according to her attorney, Zak Goldstein. A trial date hasn’t been set.
Federal inquiry
NHTSA formally decided to examine whether BlueCruise had a defect after the pair of deadly crashes.
Ford told the Journal that neither accident was caused or contributed to by Ford’s automated cruise-control design. The two accidents, the company said, unfortunately illustrate that all driving, whether by humans alone or with technology, requires adequate time to perceive, classify, confirm and react to events.
After examining data from the vehicles involved in the 2024 crashes, NHTSA said the drivers in each case failed to apply brakes or take evasive steering action. NHTSA also said BlueCruise’s adaptive cruise-control function failed to detect or respond to stopped or slow-moving vehicles.
Ford told the agency that it designed the system’s adaptive cruise control to stop decelerating in response to stationary objects when traveling at or above 62 miles an hour—to avoid the “phantom braking” phenomenon, in which the vehicle incorrectly reacts to objects such as bridges, overhead signs or other nonmoving objects that aren’t in the roadway. Ford said that other technology, such as automatic emergency braking, remains functional at speeds above 62 mph.
“Ford has designed the feature to work so that it can manage various real-world scenarios that can occur on various road types,” a spokeswoman told the Journal. The company also said there may not be adequate time for either a human driver or the automated driving system to respond under certain conditions, such as approaching an unlit vehicle at nighttime at highway speeds.
Farley, the CEO, told analysts early last year that Ford sees a lot of potential in developing a robust automated driving system that allows for “eyes off” driving in some scenarios.
Farley said current products from other carmakers only work at low speeds, and that Ford wants to offer a “fully functioning” high-speed system so that millions of customers could use it on the highway and do other tasks. The company said they want to introduce such a system as soon as 2028.
Write to Ryan Felton at ryan.felton@wsj.com
