The structure the Tesla hit (called the sled) is basically two verticals with three horizontal crosspieces. From the manufacturer.
It is designed to provide enough force to stop a vehicle over the travel distance, not as a rigid impact barrier.
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Model X Crash on US-101 (Mountain View, CA)
- Thread starter mookhead
- Start date
The structure the Tesla hit (called the sled) is basically two verticals with three horizontal crosspieces. From the manufacturer.
It is designed to provide enough force to stop a vehicle over the travel distance, not as a rigid impact barrier.
Always drive in control with hands in the wheel and ready to take action. Regardless of AP, TACC, or manual. Regardless of car type.
I do have a problem with “we cannot identify any other reason, so it must be AP”. A Jeep slammed into a wall here. No cause ideitified, must have been AP.
siucity
Button Pusher
FWIW, this is not an exit for trucks. Big trucks don't use the carpool lane. This is an exit for carpools, and it makes perfect sense in that carpoolers don't need to slow down and cut across many lanes to exit on the right.
mkspeedr
Member
I disagree. In my opinion he was in the 85 exit lane and he should have been in the 101 south lane.
My friends keep pushing me to publish my video log data from my commute. Splitting traffic I get a large data pool of what drivers are doing during their normal commute. My camera captures excellent images. I see many Tesla owners relying too much on AP - way too much. I think some of the AP users have become oblivious of the commute around them.
It is tragic and I am sorry for the family's loss. That is a horribly marked poorly designed exit.
I took a video of myself driving on 101S at ~8:30pm last night on AP1, staying on the 101S part of the carpool lane - no AP issues at all, but the circumstances were quite different (nighttime, following behind another vehicle). I can upload the video if anyone is interested, but there's not much to see.
If you have it easily accessible I think it might be nice to see the roadway/new fixed barrier in the evening hours after sunset. TEG had posted that news story from a few years back where a Lexus at around 10pm struck that same barrier location and died. Curious how visible it is at night.
I’m disappointed that Tesla blogged about this. I assume the motivation was the NTSB announcement, but what was now a local news story has been picked up by all the usual fear-mongers, which in turn gets it on the morning opinion shows, at least here in the US. I know this, because I have the pleasure of my out-laws company at my house this week, and they do an awesome job of consuming the morning news/opinion shows, so the summary after a morning of Fox & Friends (or one of those shows, honestly they all blend into one for me) was “another Tesla drove itself into a barrier”. Urrgh.
My disappointment comes from the fact that although Tesla tried to state some facts in the blog, it comes across as being defensive, and focuses heavily on auto-pilot, when that’s just one factor here (and maybe not at all, we don’t know). What’s not in doubt, due to the many street-view updates in this part of the world, is that many, many cars have struck the barrier. I assume other people have unfortunately died, but only Caltrans, I guess, has those statistics. The many photos of the compressed barrier, and various other barrier solutions in just the past few years shows that any car can and has driven into it.
I’m not talking about apportioning blame, or the rights and wrongs of lane markings, driver habits etc etc. The fact is that many cars have collided with this barrier, and most if not all prior collisions were not under autopilot control, and likely not an electric car, although there’s obviously a higher concentration of EV’s in the area. This IS another tragic news event, but the story shouldn’t be overly influenced because it’s a Tesla, an EV, there was a fire, or (maybe) under auto-pilot control. Worst case, if it was under AP control, and there were no other mitigating circumstances (there nearly always is), then AP did just what a bunch of humans have done many times in the past, despite successfully navigating that stretch of road successfully 200 times per day.
My disappointment comes from the fact that although Tesla tried to state some facts in the blog, it comes across as being defensive, and focuses heavily on auto-pilot, when that’s just one factor here (and maybe not at all, we don’t know). What’s not in doubt, due to the many street-view updates in this part of the world, is that many, many cars have struck the barrier. I assume other people have unfortunately died, but only Caltrans, I guess, has those statistics. The many photos of the compressed barrier, and various other barrier solutions in just the past few years shows that any car can and has driven into it.
I’m not talking about apportioning blame, or the rights and wrongs of lane markings, driver habits etc etc. The fact is that many cars have collided with this barrier, and most if not all prior collisions were not under autopilot control, and likely not an electric car, although there’s obviously a higher concentration of EV’s in the area. This IS another tragic news event, but the story shouldn’t be overly influenced because it’s a Tesla, an EV, there was a fire, or (maybe) under auto-pilot control. Worst case, if it was under AP control, and there were no other mitigating circumstances (there nearly always is), then AP did just what a bunch of humans have done many times in the past, despite successfully navigating that stretch of road successfully 200 times per day.
I noticed in a number of early photos/videos that a few things were marked with a fluorescent orange spray paint. The steering wheel as mentioned before was one item. Today I noticed the two driver side tires of the Audi and I think it was the circular locking device on the attenuator track (cables wrapped around it) had also been marked in this fashion. Significance of this?
Thought more about the distance of the hood segment on 85 and it location. Workers across the street on 101 said they heard a loud explosion before the "fireball" erupted along with shooting fireworks from the battery section. This would have occured after the driver was removed from the car. Anything mentioned if he was unbuckled and removed through the driver door? Was there still dashboard and some framing left on the car at this point as well as partial hood and all of that got blown off the car when the explosion occurred? The car would have to be pretty much in its final resting position at this point but the angle outward would send it over the concrete wall and onto 85 near where it landed. Could this explosion have sharply severed the framing so cleanly and heck maybe even caused some of the splaying at the A-pillar we see?
Thought more about the distance of the hood segment on 85 and it location. Workers across the street on 101 said they heard a loud explosion before the "fireball" erupted along with shooting fireworks from the battery section. This would have occured after the driver was removed from the car. Anything mentioned if he was unbuckled and removed through the driver door? Was there still dashboard and some framing left on the car at this point as well as partial hood and all of that got blown off the car when the explosion occurred? The car would have to be pretty much in its final resting position at this point but the angle outward would send it over the concrete wall and onto 85 near where it landed. Could this explosion have sharply severed the framing so cleanly and heck maybe even caused some of the splaying at the A-pillar we see?
Report upthread was that the driver was basically sitting in the open. Drivers door was against barrier and is closed in all images. Likely took him out though missing dash area. That post also has a picture pre-large fire (seats and airbags untouched). There is some fire in that pic coming from the broken module. The cells may have acted like Roman candles.
Thanks for posting this. It seems like the lane lines are much more visible at night when illuminated by the headlights. I think a contributing factor here was probably the time of day and glare from the sun.
My best hypothesis now is that he was driving in the same lane as your were on AP, and for whatever reason, the AP lost track of the lane split and drifted the car into the non-lane leading up to the gore point and ultimately straight into the barrier. It's plausible to think that the if the Autopilot missed the Y junction of the lane split or tracked another vehicle, it might later see the two white lines of the gore point and think it was a lane, since it's flanked by two solid white lines. If the driver wasn't paying attention he would have only about 5 seconds to correct course before running straight into the barrier.
I also read the press release by Tesla yesterday and thought it sounded very defensive of Autopilot. It didn't say whether or not they knew if AP was engaged at that moment, but it's likely that they knew if AP was on in the seconds/minutes prior to the crash. Also the numbers that they cite about how many successful AP trips pass by that point doesn't mention how many of those trips were unsuccessful (i.e. the driver had to take control or corrective action).
All speculation here so take it or leave it. The best that can come out of this now is that we learn exactly what went wrong and make highways and vehicles safer for future drivers.
⚡️ELECTROMAN⚡️
Village Idiot
I think the paint was probably CHP or fire department marking locations of important objects in case they get moved later.
I suspect that the dashboard was gone before the Model X came to rest. The Samaritans may have just reached through the (new) opening / gap at the front of the vehicle since the whole frunk area was obliterated and torn away by then.
By the way, one of your screen cap seems to show both parts of the front left wheel:
I think the left edge of the Smart Cushion frame may have hit the wheel/tire directly and broke it into two pieces. Tesla wheels have a seam/indentation between the turbine blade "end cap" and the rest of the wheel. It seems to be the place where it will snap if it is put under extreme pressure. The "end cap" part had apparently flung to the other end of the left lane, but it appears that someone had picked it up and moved it back over by the Smart Cushion before the news crews arrived.
Pic from a totally different Tesla accident where the wheel came apart in what appears to be a similar way:
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You misunderstand my logic. I'm looking for the simplest explanation that matchs all the fact as we know them at this point and invokes the least number of anomalous conditions. So if you consider the most probable case, that the driver was not risk taker, or impaired in any way, and was not interacting with other risk taking or impaired drivers, or traffic movement anomalies of any kind, you're left with an explanation of how a competent driver could run into a fixed barrier, on a road he was familiar with, in normal flowing traffic.
Yes, he could have realized he was in the wrong lane at the last moment, or could have been forced over by another driver's error, but why then apparently no braking, or tire swerve marks? Given we I know so far, I've limited my scenario to the simplest one possible, which assumes only one anomalous condition, poor light conditions and lane marking quality for lane resolving by AP, which I know to be true.
By listing the assumptions required for any scenario for how this could of happen, and assigning probabilities to each assumption, you can mathematically compare any 2 possibilities. Right now I think the highest probability is that he was in lane #2, but if you told me it was only his second day at work at the Apple offices in Sunnyvale, and previously he had worked in Cupertino, I would say it makes more sense he was in the #1 lane, out of habit, since he was used to forking to 85 at that point. In that case another scenario might become more plausible (mathematically).
Not likely, this data is only useful in aggregate form, so an upload once a night is sufficient for their metrics.
Even if they released the data, there is no way (unless the data is really specific) to differentiate AP issues vs driver realizing they are in the wrong lane, vs driver dodging another driver, vsd river braking for any reason, so the number is not deterministic of anything.
Compare your conclusion (AP induced crash) against all the other instances of the barrier being hit. There are no (lasting) swerve or braking marks from them (else how could we distinguish from this accident). Given the majority (all?) previous collisions were non-Tesla vehicles, placing the blame on a feature of a Tesla seems like a reach.
My guess is that AP strongly defaults towards "follow the car in front of you" logic whenever it perceives road markings as the least bit ambiguous. Thus, I think that AP's behavior when there is a car in front of it (even at some distance) is not particularly indicative of how AP will behave in the same location when there is no car to follow.
The ability to follow other cars allows AP to "fake it" when it doesn't understand a road that is at least more-or-less readable by a human driver (which is basically all roads, otherwise drivers would be constantly weaving between lanes). But, of course, AP can't "fake it" when there is no lead car. In that instance, it needs to figure out the road markings on its own.
This Lemming behavior creates some other problems in that it assumes that the driver of the leading-car is at least minimally competent at reading the road. A drunk or distracted leading-car driver can cause AP to mimic bad choices. Furthermore, you have to wonder what happens when AP-type features are more common, and you get a series of AP cars all following each other through a road with markings they can't quite figure out.
NeverFollow
Active Member
I wonder what speed the Model X was going at the time of the impact?
It would be helpful to reproduce the crash, like the 100MPH Mythbuster video:
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