US auto safety regulators said on Monday (Aug 16) they had opened a formal safety probe into Tesla's driver assistance system Autopilot after a series of crashes involving emergency vehicles.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said that since January 2018, it had identified 11 crashes in which Tesla models "have encountered first responder scenes and subsequently struck one or more vehicles involved with those scenes".

It said it had reports of 17 injuries and one death in those crashes.

All of nature springs from a handful of components — the fundamental particles — that interact with one another in only a few different ways. In the 1970s, physicists developed a set of equations describing these particles and interactions. Together, the equations formed a succinct theory now known as the Standard Model of particle physics.