Richard34212
Member
Funny, I don't remember all the hysterical outrage when this happened...
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[UPDATED] 2 die in Tesla crash - NHTSA reports driver seat occupied
- Thread starter diplomat33
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Yeah, I think some of this comes from the "Family Feud" level of understanding that people have of the world.
Ask random people: "Quick, name the top 5 things that come to your mind about Tesla".
Now try Cadillac, Ford, Honda.
Under Tesla you're going to get "They drive themselves don't they?" as one of the top reasons. I doubt that will show up in the other brands. Why? Because that's the brand identity that has been created. Almost every car story or review about Tesla says it somewhere.
The point being that when something goes wrong involving a Tesla, people are going to jump on the self-driving aspect quicker than with the other brands of car.
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The reason people abuse the Tesla Autopilot is that it works. Real owners know that if they drive a vehicle that has a supposedly (and according to CR, a superior) similar system, the system sucks and after a minute or two it will disengage, require a correction, etc. and if that is not done, it will drive you to the sure death. That means that attempting stunts like leaving the driver's seat empty is totally meaningless.
EVNow
Well-Known Member
Oh yes, we have clarity. You just have to be reading AP/FSD related threads for the past few years.
What is fuzzy is - when will AP get activate. It gets activated whenever NN can recognize the lane - which is a statistical event and thus fuzzy. It will work almost always when both the lines are clearly marked. The certainty goes down after that. On unmarked roads it more than likely won't recognize the lane. But once in a while it does !
For eg. in my street with no marked lines at all - 99% of the time it won't recognize the lane. But today for a split second it did - and allowed me to switch on the AP. I guess the particular way the road was drying up after some showers caused this.
Not really, because Autopilot would not operate at over 35mph on any street with 30mph speed limit and any Tesla owner with Autopilot would know this from experience, so would not "try to demonstrate" something impossible. This very point was being missed by all the carefully "fact checking" journalists, who were quick to claim the car was on AP.
"The first aircraft autopilot was developed by Sperry Corporation in 1912." -- so over 100 years ago, according to wikipedia.
The definition of Autopilot is:
The use of the name by Tesla is completely appropriate, those who are "confused" should learn the meaning of the word instead of blaming others who use it correctly.
BTW, the first automotive system called Autopilot was by Chrysler in 1958:
Of course, that was a plain and simple cruise control, so journalists should freak out much more about that!
Here's another, an even older ad that could irresponsibly encourage dangerous experimentation - especially if the stupid brother is listening in just outside the frame:
This is a Hudson, the name of this model was the Terraplane - in name and in the streamlined shape, evoking thoughts of the exciting and romantic new Aeroplane.
The aviation theme continues, to this day, to be a source of inspiration in the design and marketing of automobiles. So in this line of thinking, an Autopilot feature would be a natural market winner.
After a crash like that, how was he able to move, come on man"Two men are dead after a Tesla traveling in Spring crashed into a tree and no one was driving the vehicle, officials say.
The crash happened at 11:25 p.m. in the Carlton Woods subdivision near The Woodlands. The car burst into flames after hitting a tree near 18 Hammock Dunes Place.
Harris County Precinct 4 Constable Mark Herman told KPRC 2 that the investigation showed “no one was driving” the fully-electric 2019 Tesla when the accident happened. There was a person in the passenger seat of the front of the car and in the rear passenger seat of the car."
‘No one was driving the car’: 2 men dead after fiery Tesla crash near The Woodlands, officials say
Two men are dead after a Tesla ran into a tree in Spring.www.click2houston.com
This is horrible and tragic.
Sounds like the men tried to pretend the car is driverless, like we see in the prank videos, but this time, with deadly consequences. It is also possible that they were driving manually, joy riding, went too fast and lost control. When the crash happened, the driver tried to crawl in the back seat to get out, but was unable to before the car caught fire, but it gave the impression the car was driverless when it was not.
We should wait for the final report. But it is terrible either way.
either way two men are dead because they found a work around the safety.
Please read a few pages of the thread first. Thank you.
A brief recoup:
THE crash happened in a gated cul-de-sac on a road without lane marks and about 400 ft from the place of start.
Even if you manage to engage the autopilot, its acceleration unlikely to get you to the speed much in excess of 40 mph over this short distance. Plus, there was literally nowhere to go on AP on this road even if you manage to engage it.
So, unless this is the first ever case of a crazy Tesla computer killing people, the Autopilot unlikely played any role in this crash, that further corroborated by Elon Musk who twitted that AP was not engaged.
If both occupants of the Tesla were buckled in, as reported by some sources, that means there was a third person who drove the car, tried to launch it, failed, crashed in the tree, and run away after the collision.
The report that the car was driverless is based on statements of personal convictions of Mark Herman, an elected police official, to the media. He has been proven to provide misleading information about the accident. Specifically, that the fire could not be extinguished for 4 hours, while in fact it was extinguished in under 5 minutes. The working hypothesis is that Mark Herman found some really torquing mushrooms in Woodland forest and saw things.
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Two men are dead. Right now, that is literally the only information that we know for sure.
Mike
We’ve seen and read about some really bad crashes where the car looks horrible after the front end was impacted, including hit by wrong way drivers hitting head on, and the Tesla drivers are not severely hurt and can exit the car. It’s for this kind of protection that people choose to buy their Teslas. This battery fire was reported to 911 around 9:20pm according to fire dept. statements with the accident supposedly happening around 9pm. The press gives the public the impression that battery fires happen immediately on impact but we’ve seen that not the case in many instances from reports or videos.
There’s another thread in this forum area of a driver in China that was just in an accident with his Tesla (apparently not on AP best I can tell) and this was a quote taken from the Global Trends news report in China:
“According to the video of other vehicle driving recorders at the scene, the vehicle hits the concrete barrier on the outermost side of the road at high speed. The vehicle flicked its tail and damaged the body. During the impact, the chassis was seriously damaged. After the people on the vehicle evacuated, the vehicle was in an accident. A fire broke out about 15 minutes later.”
From what I remember of the accident on 101 where the MX impacted a barrier head on and split in two with the driver seat-belted in, the good samaritans who saw the accident and stopped were able to get the person unbuckled and out of the car before the batteries started to pop and catch the car on fire. Very possible the same might be said of the occupants of this crash.
examples in video: this of a MS like the vehicle in Houston accident, with head on crash and Tesla driver gets out reportedly uninjured:
this was a MX hit head on by wrong way driver in Scottsdale. Tesla driver was alive and taken to hospital. Remember this being discussed on the forum.
There was a Model S in southern Calif that hit a parked fire truck in the express lanes. Driver wasn’t injured.
Just illustrates people have survived, some able to just walk away, from very hard impacts to the front of their cars.
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Watch those vids and tell me Tesla’s aren’t one of the safest cars on the roads... someone trying to bring up demographics... man get the *sugar* outta here....
If you go to get an Autopilot certified by the FAA, one of the requirements is that you have to demonstrate if it fails or disconnects, you cannot expect a pilot to react within 3 seconds. The test literally is to fail the system and wait 1, 2, 3, before the test pilot is allowed to touch the controls. The FAA prohibits autopilot use in places where a faster take-over speed would be needed, because human factors studies show that is as quick as it is reasonable to expect a trained pilot to react after long periods of the system working well.
Tesla's "Autopilot" and "Full Self Driving" require much more active monitoring than any aircraft autopilot.
Tesla's own statistics say that their cars without any active safety features (pre-2015 cars) get into accidents that trigger airbags at half the rate of the average car on the road. What do you believe this is if not demographics?
Given the altitude of most planes in flight there is more distance to cover in that time should something go wrong mid air unlike the extreme shorter distance to travel for a car on the road so not sure that's a fair comparison unless I'm misunderstanding what you said.
I think it would be reasonable to assume Tesla's AP would require a lot more supervision than an aircraft AP. There's a lot more space in the air: you don't have other planes "pulling out" in front of you or weaving in and out of the same flight path as you, planes flying by you in the opposite direction just feet to the side, etc.
Mike
SomeJoe7777
Marginally-Known Member
Thus I assume that your point is that these driver assitance modes would not meet any rule similar to the FAA's autopilot guidelines (>3 second safety margin after disengagement to allow operator to take control).
But this is also the case for regular cruise control, which has been available in automobiles for over 60 years. And in those 60 years, no such rule has been enacted by the NHTSA.
Either the rule is not necessary for any vehicle, or if it is necessary then it has to apply to all vehicles, and Tesla would be no different than anyone else. You are cherry-picking Tesla's automation systems specifically for criticism while ignoring the implications of your analysis to other vehicles. This is the very definition of bias.
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