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Yes, "freak accident" generally implies some wildly unlikely confluence of events. White trailers are really common. The sun shining in your face is not uncommo
by TillE 10y ago
Yes, "freak accident" generally implies some wildly unlikely confluence of events. White trailers are really common. The sun shining in your face is not uncommon.
As far as I can tell, the only rare circumstance here is that Tesla's autopilot would be enabled on a road where there's cross traffic.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mickronome 10y agoI agree that it's not much of a freak accident, and you got me thinking that there might be some additional aspects of this case that might be worth considering. For most of my life I have lived somewhere with lots of snow, and where the sun hangs out close to the horizon during the entire day during the winter, and I have never understood why white cars and tractor trailers are legal on public roads. In some conditions you are lucky if you see them at 1/2 the range of a vehicle of just about any other color. Even compared to ligt grays/silver metallic it's a huge difference. Maybe something with the faint silhouette not looking very vehicle-like making the brain ignore it, I don't know? While white vehicles can be harder to spot only with the sun being close to the horizon, add some drifting snow and they essentially becomes ghosts. So while the accident clearly show Teslas autopilot is not good enough for hands free driving - of which it has made no claim to be - it might also be telling us a very simple fact: That white is a particularly bad colour for tractor trailers regardless if it is a human or a computer interpreting the visual field ?