The car came to rest more than 70 metres away, on the opposite side of the road, leaving a trail of wreckage. According to witnesses, the Model S burst into flames while still airborne. Several passersby tried to open the doors and rescue the driver, but they couldn’t unlock the car. When they heard explosions and saw flames through the windows, they retreated. Even the firefighters, who arrived 20 minutes later, could do nothing but watch the Tesla burn.
At that moment, Rita Meier was unaware of the crash. She tried calling her husband, but he didn’t pick up. When he still hadn’t returned her call hours later – highly unusual for this devoted father – she attempted to track his car using Tesla’s app. It no longer worked. By the time police officers rang her doorbell late that night, Meier was already bracing for the worst.
If we lived in any sort of reasonable or responsible world then these cars would be banned from public roads all over the globe.
And Tesla would be fined and sued into oblivion.
And the people who knowingly put profits before lives would be individually serve time for manslaughter.
Call me a Luddite but I won’t ride in a “self driving” car. I don’t even trust lane assist although I’ve never had a car with that feature.
I think my sweet spot is 2014 for vehicles. It’s about 50/50 with the tracking garbage and the “advanced features” on those models but anything past 2015 seems to be fully fly-by-wire and that doesn’t sit right with me.
I’m old though and honestly if I bought a 2014 right now and babied it as my non commuter car I could probably keep it until I should give up my keys. You younger people are going to have to work around all this crap.
I’ve got a 2008 manual. It doesn’t even have cruise control. It’s perfect. I’m keeping it as long as I possibly can.
'96 and '05 pickup trucks I keep flogging along for work, '05 SUV that’s owned by my wife. They aren’t going to last forever but I’m going to try.
I have a Sprinter van with lane assist for cross country travel. As obnoxious as it is 99% of the time, it has come in clutch a few times when I started to get drowsy and drifted off my lane.
Yikes. Chew gum, pinch the lobe of your ear, take a nap.
Your anecdote terrifies me that people may be relying on this shit when they are overtired.
Driving when tired enough to drift out of your lane multiple times?
You shouldn’t have a license.
I suddenly got very tired today when driving, and noticed my car drifting out of lane as I was unfocused, I was far from home, didn’t have any snacks or anything.
Luckily I found a place to park soon after, pulled over, and rested for 20 min or so.
Tiredness can come sudden, it doesn’t mean you should loose your license as long as you can deal with it in a safe manner.
I hear you, but a 99% chance of being obnoxious isn’t a great review.
I think I’ll just stick to not driving when tired.
That’s easier said than done. You can’t judge your own behavior when impaired because you are impaired. By the time you are aware you are that tired, you’ve already been impaired for a long time.
Article does not actually answer why Tesla vehicles crash as much as they do or how their crash frequency compares to other vehicles. Its more about how scummy tesla is as a company and how it witholds data from the public when it could incriminate them.
In some ways that is the answer. Crashes keep happening because they are not being held accountable to regulators because they are not reporting these incidents and no one is exercising oversight to be sure the reporting matches reality.
I think over the years, accurate reporting by manufacturers has been done because they generally do not want to be known as that car company that killed a child and it could have been prevented with a 50 cent bolt. As a result, regulators have been less hawkish. Of course there are probably political donations in the US to help keep the wheels turning.
just scanning the article, it seems to sum it up as - No one knows why yet, not even Tesla ’
Wait, I might know the answer. Is it because they don’t use LIDAR and they’re made by a company headed by some piece of shit who likes to cut costs? Haha, I was just guessing, but ok.
This is the kind of shit that makes me worried even seeing someone else driving one of these deathtraps near me while I am driving. They could explode or decide to turn into me on the highway or something. I think I about this more than Final Destination when seeing a logging truck these days.
Tesla’s garbage quality is sadly hurting the entire EV and self driving industry. Self driving cars will always have accidents. But a good self driving company will use every single accident to ensure that never happens again with their system. Humans can make the same error over and over but once self driving has been around a while, the rates of sef driving caused accidents will reduce more and more every year.
the truth? Because Elon is the CEO errrr Teknoking.
News of malfunctioning Tesla cars and Musk going crazy are still not enough to crash Tesla stocks to zero. Which I am hoping will happen not just to inflict sorrow on Musk and his wealth, but so that I could hedge against the stock 😂
Tesla tried to do it all at once instead of perfecting the electric tech first and then incrementally adding on advances. They also made change for change’s sake. There’s absolutely no reason mechanical door locks could not have been engineered to work on this car as the default method of opening and closing the door. It’s killing people.
There’s absolutely a reason to not engineer something you’re not required to. It’s called capitalism. Tesla cut every corner they could.
No, the problem is they engineered something they didn’t need to, because Musk thinks everything should be electric because it’s cool. They had to then engineer a mechanical release, because it was required by law (for good reason)
Mechanical door locks would have been cheaper. The fly by wire in the cyber truck is far more expensive, heavier, and far more dangerous than the very well polished power steering systems every other car uses
Maybe it’s something like they wanted to make more money on repairs or something… But even that they could’ve done better by starting from very common, cheap technology
Let’s be clear… The real problem here is that Elon Musk, opinion having idiot that he is, made decisions from on high with very little understanding of engineering
Musk thinks everything should be electric because it’s cool.
I strongly disagree. Things are getting more and more electric across all manufacturing because it is cheap. A single touch screen that drops in place under a snap on bezel with a premade cable harness and some programming time is so much faster and cheaper than designing, installing, wiring, coding, and testing physical buttons or mechanical linkages. PCBs can be tested in a negligible amount of time.
Mechanical door locks would have been cheaper.
No. Sorry, but no. The locks were going to be electrically operated no matter what. But the inclusion of standard mechanical components would increase the cost significantly.
very common, cheap technology
Yes, but that would be electrical components. It’s not very intuitive, I agree. But cost is the sole reason things are becoming more “electronic”. Electronics are extremely cheap compared to their analog ancestors. And not only that, but since very few mfrs are using off the shelf mechanical components, they are now less supplied and harder to get. So their cost is going up. Electronics are going down.
I don’t know the engineering endeavors that he may or may not have been directly involved with. I’m not entirely sure what “from on high” means, but I would presume you are referring to his net value and authority. In that case, I would say he is no different than literally any other CEO. He made decisions that made him a profit. That’s what they do. GE is a great test case for this. Nearly destroyed the company in the long term so that board members see a small financial gain in the short term, then dump the carcass on the next guy. It’s just money. That’s all.
Elon : some of you will die, but that is a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
Also, the fact that they removed Lidar sensors and just base their self driving on cameras is plainly stupid.
Technical debt.
If you promise self driving on all cars, but cars already on the road don’t have lidar then no car has lidar.
That’s not really the case, as Elon’s already admitted that there are at least about a half a million Teslas with old HW3 self driving computers that need to have them upgraded to HW4 for them to have the chance at eventually get the FSD the buyers were promised. That’s not even mentioning the upgraded cameras the HW4 vehicles have gotten. The reason for Musk not wanting lidar on Teslas is very simple: cost. He thinks it’s too expensive and unnecessary, unlike every single other manufacturer working on the same problem.
I mean it’s all true:
- humans drive based on vision alone
- moving to one type of sensor simplifies the ai
- lidar has been much bulkier, much more expensive than other sensors.
Most importantly, since no one has self driving yet, it’s premature to talk about that as a mistake. Let it fail or succeed on its merits. Let other self-driving attempts fail or succeed on their merits.
Waymo runs a taxi service at scale.
They don’t though. Waymo runs a few pilots in a few specific geolocked locations with essentially hand built cars at a huge loss. They also have human remote supervisions. They do seem fairly successful and maybe their slow careful rollout will eventually be at scale in the areas that need it most. Hopefully it will work.
While it’s easy to argue Tesla hasn’t had those successes yet, they do have the “at scale” part down and are already profitable on the vehicles. They are close enough to self-driving them at they’re willing to try their own pilots with human intervention. If they succeed, they already have the scaling up done and are profitable on hardware so will quickly surpass other competitors.
I like that different companies are taking different approaches, so we have competition. May the best technology succeed!
This is a wonderful attitude to have as long as it’s not in the comments of an article about how Tesla’s approach is trapping people and burning them alive.
In this crash, part of the blame was on retracting handles on the outside, not the interior locks. If the handle is retracted, it’s tough to open the door from the outside.
- model s has electrically presented handles. The car has to be somewhat functional for the handles to extend …. I haven’t heard of extend on emergency or extend on power lost, or any other failsafe
- model 3/y door handles are not electrical. You have to press on one end to extend the other. You may or may not like them, but at least they don’t have that failure case of what happens when the car loses power
Just FYI all the Tesla cars to my knowledge need power for the doors to open because the handles aren’t physically attached to the door mechanism. They’re all electronic. If you own one of these cars I highly advise you to read the manual and find out where the mechanical door releases are(they’re somewhat hidden).
Another fun fact and this isn’t exclusive to Tesla. If you pay attention when you open the door the window retracts a tiny bit to clear the weatherstripping. If you have no power that can’t happened. What is unique to Tesla as far as I can tell is that their weatherstripping isn’t as large/pliable as other manufacturers or maybe it’s just the assembly. Using the mechanical release with power still retracts the window. In the event the battery is dead or damaged from an accident using the mechanical release requires breaking the window. That means the door is significantly more difficult to open.
I drive a BMW i4 and one of the reasons I prefer it is because it still uses a number of mechanical options like physical buttons and an actual door handle. I never trusted that flush handle from Tesla, even back when I liked Tesla.
Bad code. Guinea pig owners. Cars not communicating with each other. Relying on just the car’s vision and location is stupid.
Also, not only do they rely on “just vision”, crucially they rely on real-time processing without any memory or persistent mapping.
This, more than anything else is what bewilders me most.
They could map an area, and when observing a construction hazard save that data and share it with other vehicles so they know when route setting or anticipate the object. Not they don’t. If it drives past a hazard and goes around the block it has to figure out how to navigate the hazard again with no familiarity. That’s so foolish.
FYI, some numbers. The guardian article is still definitely worth reading, it just had no statistics.
*Nationally (USA), Tesla drivers had 26.67 accidents per 1,000 drivers. This was up from 23.54 last year.
The Ram and Subaru brands were again among the most accident-prone. Ram had 23.15 per 1,000 drivers while Subaru had 22.89.
…
As of October 2024, there have been hundreds of documented nonfatal incidents involving Autopilot and fifty-one reported fatalities, forty-four of which NHTSA investigations or expert testimony later verified and two that NHTSA’s Office of Defect Investigations verified as happening during the engagement of Full Self-Driving (FSD).*
its on you if you bought a tesla after the twitter purchase, cant have buyers remorse.
You can choose not to drive bleeding edge technology, but sadly you have no choice in whether to share the road with it.
I have never ridden a Tesla, and I plan on requesting a non Tesla car from now on when I have to take a taxi.
Cars in general, Teslas in particular, should have a standardized blackbox data recorder that third parties can open and access the logs, we have had this kind of tech on aircrafts for many decades.
It is terrifying that Tesla can just say that there was no relevant data and the investigative agency will just accept that.
I remember watching an episode of Air Crash Investigations, where a plane crashed, and they could not find an immediate cause, but the flight data recorder was able to be analysed far back, way before the accident flight, and they noticed that a mount for the APU turbine had broken many flights earlier, and the APU had broken free during the flight, causing the crash.
It is not Tesla’s job to tell the investigators what is relevant and not, it is Teslas job to unlock all data they have and send it to the investigators, if they can’t or won’t, then Tesla should lose the right sell cars in Europe
Cars do have that in what amounts to a TCU or Telematics Control Unit. The main problem here isn’t whether or not cars have that technology. It’s about the relevant government agency forcing companies like Tesla (and other automakers) to produce that data not just when there’s a crash, but as a matter of course.
I have a lot of questions about why Tesla’s are allowed on public roads when some of the models haven’t been crash tested. I have a lot of questions about why a company wouldn’t hand over data in the event of a crash without the requirement of a court order. I don’t necessarily agree that cars should be able to track us (if I buy it I own it and nobody should have that kind of data without my say so). But since we already have cars that do phone this data home, local, state, and federal government should have access to it. Especially when insurance companies are happy to use it to place blame in the event of a crash so they don’t have to pay out an insurance policy.
Natural Selection.
