Two people in Tesla killed after crashing into parked semi at Florida rest stop
cdllife.com
cdllife.com
How the hell the Tesla managed to hit a truck at what looks like highway speeds there is hard to imagine. If this was an FSD or autopilot failure, it would be by far the most egregious I’ve seen.
I am intensely curious what really does happen if you try to get a refund for FSD. (That, whether or not this was actually an FSD event.)
Presumably, you signed some BS about arbitration, so you go to arbitration. What then? Maybe their tame arbitrator says "f** off", so then you sue. Does Tesla contest it, or pay? If not, and it goes to court, does Tesla default and get ordered to pay?
Has anybody got a judge to order treble damages, for bad faith and for making you need to go to court just to get back what you paid for what they utterly failed to deliver?
It seems like there could be a specialty in suing Tesla for refusing a refund. And, there must be a fair number of cases either settled or adjudicated already.
From the map it likely followed the traffic sweep in feeder to the rest stop and identified the parked vehicles as traffic ahead on what was assumed to be a highway.
By my understanding many Tesla models lack Lidar for ranging and speed estimates and operate solely on relatively limited PoV vision cameras.
IIRC: Elon Musk’s Crash Course (althugh there may be several, I'd have to check my records for the one(s) that I've viewed).
https://i.imgur.com/YKtf8Jj.jpg (4032 x 3024 pixels)
I recall in Europe these became mandatory decades ago when a similar crash happened, killing one person, the family of which fought a long battle to have these bars become mandatory (which a couple of years later saved my father's life when he launched to overtake a truck, that suddenly decided to brake hard and turn left without notice at the last second).
edit: seems like in 2015, 2% were killed this way in Germany (where it's been mandatory for decades) vs 16% in the US https://www.dekra-roadsafety.com/fr/protection-anti-encastre...
I don't know if all of them have it, or if it's mandated, but a lot of trailers do have those bars on the rear end.
Those are only rated for impacts to 35 mph. From the position of the Tesla in the image, it may have been travelling substantially faster.
The Tesla is also a deceptively massive automobile for its size, with much of that mass being low, in particular below the position of an underride bar, which might otherwise engage with the engine of a conventional vehicle. Effectively, the Tesla has a longer lever arm to apply force to the undderride bar. Whether or not that is a factor in Tesla-trailer collisons isn't clear, but might be something that warrants investigation and testing.
Based on what?
If it was indeed an FSD failure then that’d be unacceptable. Regulations need to be tightenedt at the very least, Tesla fined heavily and FSD banned I suppose.
But we are not there yet; let’s wait and see
At least, the article is pretty factual, and does not had any inuendo about FSD. I would like to know who is conducting the investigation, though (how much is done by the police, how much by automotive regulatory body, how much by Telsa itself, etc...)
Thoughts go to the family of the people inside the car, and to the people investigating.
What worries me are the comments on here. There's clearly a very strong bias at play in the hacker news community (regardless of what one ought to think of Tesla or Elon).
You reap what you sow.
Tesla created hype environment and now pays for the bullseye they painted on their forehead
And with some drivers being a danger to themselves and others, you might legitimately wonder if fsd wouldn't be the better alternative.
People die every day on roads. Mostly because they are being people and get drunk, tired, distracted, reckless, etc. It's very likely the driver ticked one or more of these boxes. The simple explanations are usually the right ones.
Less likely, sure, unlikely, you'd be surprised about the amount of people driving for excessive durations or in a chronically or occasionally sleep deprived state.
But it cannot autonomously change lanes or turn off the highway into the rest area (Navigate on Autopilot only applies to later versions of Autopilot).
So even if Autosteer was engaged there was almost certainly a human error or miscalculation in the chain of events. Perhaps the driver had a heart attack and pressed the accelerator.
There is far too little information available for us on the outside to make confident pronouncements about what actually happened and who, if anyone, might be at fault.
I realize this car didn't have "FSD" so i don't even know why it appears on HN.
I think "operator error" would be everyone's default assumption for any other make of vehicle, or if the make had not been mentioned.
TRSLA
(ignore that he's said this for like 10 years in a row now)
If the system is heavily based on machine learning, there may be no such code bugs or algorithmic mistakes to find, no easy way to show exactly what went wrong and why a fix will prevent it from happening again.
https://insideevs.com/news/584686/mercedes-level-3-autonomou...