Cause of Fatal 2021 Tesla Wreck Was “Excessive Speed” and “Alcohol Intoxication”
ntsb.gov
ntsb.gov
Although the driver’s seat was found vacant and the driver was found in the left rear seat, the available evidence suggests that the driver was seated in the driver’s seat at the time of the crash and moved into the rear seat postcrash. Specifically, residential security video showed both the driver and passenger getting into the front seats prior to driving away from the residence. In addition, the EDR data showed active accelerator pedal inputs consistent with driver activity in the 5 seconds prior to the impact with the tree, and that the driver’s seat belt was connected at the time of the crash. Finally, the steering wheel examination conducted by the NTSB Materials Laboratory indicated an impact to the upper left quadrant, consistent with the driver loading the steering wheel during a frontal crash.
The entire journey appears to have lasted less than a minute (9:07pm is mentioned both as the time the car left the driveway, and as the time of the crash), so it's unlikely the driver jumped into the back seat as a stunt while driving.
https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...
The NTSB might have been trying to use neutral language for uncertain events, like how "the position changed" could mean intent or just a force of nature. I don't know what the right interpretation is.
It's surprising how fast I got out of the car via back seats without even thinking.
(only thought was - door on my side is potentially blocked, get out...)
(And yeah, I'm on record saying that it's extremely unlikely autopilot commanded the lane change in that Bay Bridge accident. It just doesn't work like that, the blinkers came on simultaneous with the motion. That's a human driver for sure.)
And notably, Musk did not chime in to blame the driver like he always does when the driver is at fault, which is very strong circumstantial evidence that FSD was engaged.
Look, the clearly most likely scenario here is that the driver got confused, overrode the AP, and then failed to maintain awareness as they commanded the sudden lane change. Obviously that's not what people want to hear, but it's the best explanation. I've pulled AP out and changed lanes manually, probably rapidly, on a bunch of occasions. All it takes is to do that when not paying attention...
All your logic was equally applicable to the accident in the linked article, and it was all wrong there too. (Also... Musk didn't "blame the driver" in the linked case? Not sure what you're citing. Tesla generally doesn't say anything about their customers' accidents, for some very obvious reasons.)
Just wait. All I'm telling you is that I drive with this product every day and I'm not seeing FSD behavior in that video. If it turns out I'm wrong then I'll sheepishly admit it. But I know which direction the spin runs and my BS detector is pretty good.
As for not seeing FSD behavior in that video...I do. It looks like the idiot Teslas I see every morning on my commute, randomly braking and swerving like drunk frat boys.
Yeah, that's what all these arguments always come down to. They start with "safety" and end with simple emotion.
Look, I'm genuinely sorry there are jerks in Teslas near you. But they're just that: perfectly human jerks driving like perfectly normal human beings. Please don't project your hatred of the culture, or Musk, or EVs, or whatever on the safety aspects of the system.
Also: call a friend and get a ride. They're pretty amazing vehicles. You'd be stunned at how fun it is to have a robot drive you around.
My coworker gave me a ride in his Tesla 2 months ago, on the roads near SpaceX's facility in SoCal. During the 15 minute ride FSD tried to cross over into the opposing lanes, ran a red, narrowly avoided hitting a cyclist (because the cyclist swerved away to save his life) and failed to recognize half of the cars on the road with us.
It was a terrifying experience. And he said it was not much worse than his normal commute with FSD.
If that’s what it sees when it’s still, idk how to trust it when it’s moving.
I mean, try this yourself! Pull up to a stop light, close your eyes, and recite the distances to and orientations of the nearest five or six vehicles. Now read it off the screen. Think you'll beat the car? Really? In fact, no, it's quite clear that the car, with 360 degrees of camera coverage at 30 Hz and no fovea or neck scanning required, has a vastly better picture of its surroundings than the driver. It's not even close.
But yeah, the esimates aren't precise and yeah, they do jump around[1]. You're absolutely correct about the way the modelling works. You're just disastrously wrong about the way that the competing systems perform.
[1] I will grant that there's probably a human factors issue here. In fact the human driver really can't do much to process that display and it's probably best that details like just be left out or filtered down to a minimal subset.
Other commenter "My coworker gave me a ride in his Tesla ... FSD tried to cross over into the opposing lanes, ran a red, narrowly avoided hitting a cyclist"
Your reply "Huh. FSD (Mine) took my kid to diving practice this afternoon. Weird world. Just please stop with the hate."
I'm not sure what you hope to prove by replying to anecdotes about unacceptable autopilot with anecdotes about acceptable autopilot? It doesn't mean everyone else is a hater any more than you're a shill. It just means autopilot performance across hardware and environmental factors is not within the envelope it needs to be.
Maybe try replacing "FSD" in these comments with the names of two fictional friends.
"Steve tried to cross over into the opposing lanes, ran a red, narrowly avoided hitting a cyclist"
"Huh. Rick took my kid to diving practice this afternoon. Weird world. Just please stop with the hate."
Should we trust Steve because Rick is a good driver?
Speaking of risk acceptance, I wouldn't trust my life or anyone else's to FSD. I don't have FSD in my Model 3, but I have used all of the other driver assist features. There have been too many times when those features have made serious mistakes, so I don't use them. Even at it's best, FSD appears to be about as good as the worst drivers on the road. One anecdote of poor performance, for me, is one too many.
We should accept that all drivers make mistakes, even you, and demand measurable safety metrics from all our control systems. Is that really so weird?
What we should not do is start thousand-comment flame wars on HN about how Steve is unsafe and that we should take away his license. In fact, those three mistakes are of course routine for human drivers. I bet you personally, statop, have done them in the past. And yet, no lynch mob.
That's the "hate" part I'm talking about. Please stop. Please. It's really hurting the discourse about a product area that's actually very subject to measurement, and about a specific product that is objectively very safe.
The NHTSA shows that Tesla AP/FSD is 50+x more likely to get into an accident than Ford and Toyota's systems, despite Tesla AP/FSD being available in a tiny fraction of the cars. Tesla AP/FSD is more than 3x more likely to get into an accident than the second worst automaker's comparable systems.
It doesn't matter how you try to analyze the statistics, Tesla AP/FSD is objectively the most dangerous in the world.
You just made that up. This is untrue, period. It's a lie. Please. Stop. I don't understand why you want to do this or what you think you're achieving by this kind of argument.
“Objectively safe“ was a pretty quick r/agedlikemilk given the recall.
Just please stop with the hate. That's really all I'm asking. If there's data let's argue about data. But once you jump off into "idiot Teslas randomly braking and swerving like drunk frat boys" there's no coming back to rational discourse.
Merely stating it was active _within_ 30 seconds, that doesn’t mean it was deactivated at the 30 second mark. Or am I missing something?
Do I have proof? Of course not, it's not my car. But that's what it looks like. And I'm pointing out that this is exactly what happened in the accident in the linked article, where Tesla drivers were all pointing out how this just didn't match AP behavior[1]. And they were ignored. And they were right. Just wait.
[1] In that case: the version of autopilot at the time would only engage on roads with lane markings, and this road didn't have them. Also the speed of the collision could only be reached on that tiny road with manually-commanded acceleration, AP is quite timid.
And the fact that this was media disinformation won't matter much, because the damage to the Tesla brand and the idea of self driving cars in the public's collective consciousness has already been done, and won't easily be undone by these newly revealed facts.
"A lie makes it halfway around the world before the truth even gets its boots on."
https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/tesla-spring-crash-f...
And even in that article, there's an addendum a couple of months later stating that a person was seen getting in the driver's seat and that the NTSB reenactment wasn't able to engage the autosteering when trying to replicate the crash.
I don't know what more you want from the press. They reported what they were told by the authorities. And then when new information came in, they reported that as well.
Possibly it's the media's job to question when law enforcement comments seem implausible?
Self driving cars were billed as the cool new thing. Then Tesla started charging people for "Full Self Driving" with a system that regresses from basic LKA that was shipping in the mid 2000s in terms of safety by using public roads for beta testing an intentionally hamstrung* L2-billed-as-L5 driving stack.
It's frustrating to watch as someone working in the AV space, and it's silly to act like this one case was isolated enough that the fact it was wrong changes any of that reality. We know Tesla's stack has killed people: it became normalized once the first few times it happened they were able to get away with victim blaming. By 2021 it was already accepted, this incident was already business as usual.
*humans just need eyes so self driving cars just need cameras
1. What do you mean, the OS and all its software is proprietary? Why can't I sideload my own fart app?
2. Highest margins in the industry? No we won't praise their business genius, we'll complain that they're charging a Tesla Fanboi Tax.
3. Like you said, RIGHT TO REPAIR, this is John Deere stuff, only it's a car and not a tractor.
4. Shit build quality would have us raving about butterfly keyboards 2.0.
And so on, and so forth. Steve Jobs had a "reality distortion field." So does Elon Musk, and it's aimed squarely at a certain very obvious demographic.
Cite? Everyone likes to throw around the word "safety" as a qualitative thing, but the only data we have points to the system being extremely safe.
Now what about active systems from back then? Almost 20 years ago Lexus had learned the lessons that Tesla kicked and resisted until about 2 years ago on. You need to watch the driver to ensure they're full attentive: https://lexusenthusiast.com/2007/09/08/a-look-at-the-lexus-l...
In markets with LKA, that same module was used to ensure that drivers were actively watching the road while it was activated.
In other words a 2007 Lexus did a better job on the one thing that Tesla is still getting dinged on (https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/tesla-driver-moni...)
Tesla blamed a man for playing Candy Crush when his Tesla drove into a barrier and killed him. Lexus had solved the problem that killed this man over a decade prior.
A 2007 Lexus would have used its Driver Awareness Module to recognize the man was not paying attention and stopped lane centering. The solution was not complex, not expensive, iirc Tesla even had interior facing cameras by then but was still resisting turning them on until much more recently.
Tesla put their not-marketing ahead of human life, because if they had enabled more aggressive awareness monitoring than capacitance sensing or silly steering wheel jiggles, Elon wouldn't get to tweet about how "you're just there for regulatory reasons"
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Also slightly off topic, but I think my biggest internet pet peeve is when people ask for a citation on a complex problem that requires critical thinking. I can't chew and pour the conclusion for you, but you're free to research before making low effort commentary like "Cite"
Lexus/Toyota doesn't "learn lessons". The are simply ultra-conservative about adopting anything so when anything is a dud or the V1 version sucks they wind up looking smart.
"They're not so smart, they just took a conservative approach to the life or death problem of drive attentiveness that resulted in their V1 solution outperforming Tesla's V3.x solution which came out 16 years later"
I mean for all their risk averseness, the Corolla got driver awareness monitoring before Tesla did, I don't think your point really works...
If you want to somehow "interpret" into saying no one has ever died driven distracted in a Lexus, you're free to, but that's a leap I won't bother engaging with.
There's always some room for (mis)interpretation, but I think you're taking a football field on this one.
That appears to be a deliberate misreading.
The GP was pointing out Tesla refused to follow well known best practices from around the beginning of Model S creation. Despite it being pointed out to them as a reckless choice numerous times.
They never said Lexus was perfect, they showed evidence Lexus appears to have taken the risks involved seriously in a way Tesla hasn’t, as evidenced by numerous recommendations from NHTSA that they did not follow or followed belatedly.
The "damage to the Tesla brand and the idea of self driving cars" wasn't caused solely by this one incident.
> "A lie makes it halfway around the world before the truth even gets its boots on."
It's not a lie to say cigarettes kill people by lung cancer, even if it's later proven that one smoker who died in some study actually got lung cancer from a different cause.
This is one of those things that always struck me as a weird, poor argument... how is autonomous driving supposed to suddenly make everyone want to stop owning their cars and use taxis instead?
Ignoring the driver, taxi/ride-hail/autonomous-ride services are much more efficient uses of a vehicle over time. (And this is just a side note, but obviously if you don't have to pay for a human driver, you make the cost of operating the vehicle much lower per kilometre, and then it becomes much more attractive, from a purely financial POV, for most people than owning their own vehicle.)
If you are ready to wait for a car to come pick you up, or to plan your trip based on the schedule of the car, and to pack your stuff in one bag that you can carry along...
... then, my friend, you are ready for public transportations :)
Car sharing is inconvenient because you first have to get to the station. Public transport often doesn't take you where you actually need to go, you're stuck to a schedule, you can't transport anything big, and it's often slower than a car. Cheap robotaxis fix that.
More importantly, I think many people have a car because there are some trips that just aren't realistically feasible without, and then they use the car because they already have it, have paid the fixed cost, and it's marginally better than public transport. With cheap robotaxis, they might use public transport for 90% of the trips because now they don't have to choose between owning a car and being unable to do those remaining 10% of trips.
Where I come from (not the US), in cities you have a bus/tram/metro every 5-10 minutes, bringing you everywhere, for a fraction of the cost of an Uber (which is why nobody uses Uber).
Places that don't have good public transport are quite remote, usually there are no Uber there, and if there is a taxi service it is quite far away so you have to wait and it's expensive.
Finally, moving one person at a time in a big heavy vehicle is less energy-efficient than having them in public transport (or better: taking the bike!). So public transport + bike again wins there, I think.
But again, it depends on the quality of your public service.
I don't go on a lot of long-term trips, but if I did that would still be a reason to get one car for a household instead of multiple. For rarer trips I would be happy to have a rental drive itself to my house.
If you mean day trips, then none of those issues are notable with a competent self-driving fleet except "one bag", but I don't think I've ever needed more than one bag for a day trip...
But also those busses wouldn't be able to come to your door, or drop you off directly at your destination.
So I don't think I'm describing efficient public transport. I'm describing something like the platonic ideal of taxis in a dense city, but without the huge number of drivers.
But now imagine if every passenger instead took an individual car? That would require a lot of cars.
Yes, an individual car is more comfortable if you can afford it and if not too many people have one (otherwise you need big big roads to avoid traffic jams). But really my ideal is closer to metros/trams than taxis.
> otherwise you need big big roads to avoid traffic jams
Right, that's the main downside, but there's a lot of areas where they'd fit.
Then of course they can be used together. In my city there is a system of rental cars that you leave at different stops: you have a card and can just take the car if it's there. The car doesn't come to you, but still it's a pretty good solution I think.
Anyway, autonomous cars have to get reliable before they can actually be used with public transports, I guess.
People that live in cities, where this is most likely to catch on earlier, already can't leave anything in their cars unless they want to come back to a smashed window.
in cities where the public transport sucks, you mean? I just don't understand who would ever want to use a car inside Paris or Amsterdam, for instance.
Already many people would benefit financially from using public transport or ride-sharing, or even carpooling, but they don't. Because they want their car! Many people are paying too much to fuel up vehicles that are much too large for their normal use, but they want their truck!
Very, very, very few people think rationally about vehicle ownership, and telling them, "You know, your car can go do other things while you're working," just doesn't fly. Why would I want someone else in my car? Why would I want to have to keep my car spotless for others? What if they don't for me? What if something happens and I want to go to lunch early, or there's an emergency and my car is 20 minutes away? These aren't rational concerns for most people, but even if a company managed to truly deliver level 5 automatic driving, I can't imagine the majority of people would use it to let their cars go any farther than the nearest parking spot without them.
I don't use a car near enough to justify owning one, but have considered getting one just because taxis are unaffordable for any bigger trips and carsharing can be a pain in the ass (mostly having to get to/from the carsharing station, inspecting for damages, and the lack of flexibility).
Solve those problems, and I will actively not want to own. Parking is expensive.
The insurance companies that underwrite them, on the other hand.
Also, empirically, traditional car companies are actually investing heavily in self-driving tech. Their capabilities actually surpass Tesla’s.
Other causes of human driver failure include driving while tired or exhausted, falling asleep at the wheel, driving while angry or upset, getting bored while driving, using the car's infotainment system while driving, using a mobile phone while driving, getting distracted by passengers, smoking pot while driving, being a recklessly immature teenager (or a grown-up idiot), lacking the bare minimum of driving skills that every driver on the road is supposed to have, and so on. The list of causes of human driver failure is long. There are a lot of horrifically dangerous human drivers -- look around you next time you're on the road.
Notably, machines are immune to all these human failure modes.
I'm looking forward to the day in which cars drive themselves well enough to rid the roads of so much dangerous human driving.
Meanwhile, excessive speed and intoxication account for more than 50% of all fatalities. You can solve this problem without having to wait for an AI car, it's probably morally justified to do even if you think those AI cars will arrive "any minute now."
Finally.. I am not looking forward to the day when a parent puts their kids in an AI car and does not accompany them to their destination. People will invent new failure modes for you.
Amazingly it’s worse than that. He was also on pills that would react with the alcohol to make things worse.
I’ll say I’m very surprised by the areal photo in the report. I was under the impression the driver (man or machine) had gone a real distance at speed before the accident. Which did lead some credence in my mind a driver assist system had been helping it along if the driver was slow to react/inattentive.
He could have pulled out of that driveway, hit the gas, and it happened. The trip had barely begun. You could do this crash easy in a 1960s sedan, no ADAS needed.
A lot of our driving in unusual conditions require our experience and reasoning about the world.
If you build a train that does what I need without requiring copious amounts of my spare time, I might take it. If you don't then your only "motivation" boils down to "reducing options until the train is all that is left."
People need infrastructure that meets their demands. If it works, they'll be plenty motivated.
The report states:
The frontal impact with the tree resulted in a power loss of the car’s 12-volt system, which runs the non-traction power systems. During normal operation, the front door latches operate electronically with the pull of the interior lever. In the event of a 12-volt system power loss, the interior front doors open as usual using the interior door handles. The rear doors also have both electronic and mechanical latches; however, mechanically opening the rear door during a power loss requires additional steps. According to the owner’s manual, during a loss of 12-volt system power, a rear-seated occupant must locate a small cutout in the carpet beneath the seat cushions and pull the mechanical release cable tab toward the center of the vehicle to manually open the rear door. Inspection of the door latches and locking hardware was limited by postcrash fire damage.
Edit: Must add that this assumes the front door was jammed and couldn't be opened mechanically.
Someone totaled my Model 3 on my birthday a few years ago and my front door was smashed. I smelled smoke and thought I had a battery fire (turns out it was smoke from the airbags). I crawled to the back seat and tried to open my door but it wouldn't open due to power loss. I ended up breaking the window because in my state of mind, I couldn't remember that the manual door override was available. People always say there is a manual backup, but even if it works, it's really hard to remember that during a terrible accident where time is an issue. Luckily I carry a knife in my car with one of those window breaking points.
I can't imagine trying to do that drunk.
Do you mean it would have been lucky in a different situation?
Because the NTSB cannot establish that conclusively given the almost total lack of physical evidence remaining after the vehicle fire.
It does not mean that a vehicle defect does not actually exist from the NTSB's point-of-view. It just means that the NTSB lacks the physical evidence to conclude anything there.
(I personally find the necessary "additional steps" required for exiting the vehicle from the rear seats in the event of a power loss troubling.)
More broadly, this NTSB report is being misinterpreted by many here.
The "probable causes" (not "causes") and "lessons learned" (tellingly distinct from the NTSB's more traditional "safety recommendations") established in the final report are exactly tailored to the physical evidence and physical facts that did remain independently of Tesla (the company) - and no more.
The actual title of the HN submission is, in my view, inappropriately written by excluding the word "probable".
This reads like a terrible design.
If you have a Tesla with these stupid rear door locks, make sure your children know how to open them.
Tesla's vehicles are not capable of self-driving and, at all times, the human driver is driving the vehicle as both Autopilot and FSD Beta are partial automated driving systems that require a human driver fallback at all times.
The attentiveness required of the human driver with a partial automated driving system is equivalent (on a systems-level) to if the vehicle was not equipped with any automated driving system at all.
My hot take is that it shouldn't be possible to accelerate that quickly unless you actually apply the pedal to 100%.
Also, I think the accelerator and brake pedals should have a different feel. Maybe they should be made of different materials so there is clear tactile feedback.
>Recently, the NTSB recommended that NHTSA require all new vehicles to be equipped with passive vehicle-integrated alcohol impairment detection systems, advanced driver monitoring systems, or a combination thereof, which are capable of preventing or limiting vehicle operation if driver impairment by alcohol is detected.
>A vehicle technology-based solution, such as intelligent speed adaptation (ISA), can reduce speeding. The NTSB has recommended that NHTSA incentivize passenger vehicle manufacturers and consumers to adopt ISA systems by, for example, including ISA in the New Car Assessment Program.
If the driver was indeed wearing a seatbelt, how does that person end up in the left back seat in a frontal crash? Now I have questions about that seat belt.
Especially considering this comment in the report: In addition, the EDR data showed active accelerator pedal inputs consistent with driver activity in the 5 seconds prior to the impact with the tree, and that the driver’s seat belt was connected at the time of the crash.
So there was a driver pushing the accelerator, wearing a seatbelt (assumption) and ending up in the rear seat behind the drivers' seat? Did the driver simply plug in the seatbelt without putting it on? Or did the driver survive the crash, get into the rear seat, and was unable to get out in time?
The full list is here https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Pages/Investigations.asp... You can see it's been a while since since they investigated a Tesla.
Two people killed in fiery Tesla crash with no one driving https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26852399 736 comments
NTSB: Tesla Model S in Crash Couldn't Have Been Using Autopilot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27112010 199 comments
Cops “almost 99.9% sure” Tesla had no one at the wheel before deadly crash https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26871001 53 comments
No one was in driver’s seat in fatal Tesla crash https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26866754 85 comments
Texas police to demand Tesla crash data as Musk denies autopilot use https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26869962 18 comments