3 ms·

The report itself - worth of reading https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/HWY18FH011-preliminary.pdf https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations

• gwern 8y ago
  No surprise there about it steering into the barrier or Tesla not-quite-lying about him getting warnings, but I'm surprised that he apparently wasn't dead on impact but survived all the way to the hospital? So even a three-car pileup with the Tesla steering straight into a barrier at 71MPH & accelerating, with the car catching on fire & being reduced to a husk, still isn't enough to kill a driver immediately. In a way, you could interpret that as demonstrating how safe Teslas are (at least, without Autopilot).
  • codeonfire 8y ago
    A doctor has to declare a person dead, paramedics can't do it. In all cases it makes sense to transport the body to the hospital where the person is pronounced dead by the doctor. Otherwise the family may argue in court the paramedics did not try enough to save the person.
    • FireBeyond 8y ago
      Not legally true, as a paramedic. EMTs and paramedics are able to declare people dead in certain, albeit limited, circumstances, sometimes involving telephone / radio consultation, sometimes not.
    • gwern 8y ago
      Usually in reports, if someone dies at the scene but is only officially declared dead at the hospital, they'll write a phrase like 'was declared dead at the hospital'. This report says instead that he was transported to the hospital 'where he died from his injuries'. Double-checking, media articles at the time uniformly describe him as dying at the hospital, and at least one says that he died in the afternoon ( http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/03/27/tesla-crash-investigation-highway-101-wei-huang/ http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/03/27/tesla-crash-inve... ) while the accident was at 9:27AM, so either traffic in the Bay Area is even worse than I remember, they like to spend hours doing CPR on a corpse, or he did in fact survive the crash and died at the hospital in a literal and not legalistic sense.
  • Analemma_ 8y ago
    Except in obvious cases like decapitation, paramedics cannot legally declare someone dead; it has to be done by an MD, and the paramedics will keep trying to revive you until you get to the hospital. So it's not necessarily true that he didn't die in the crash.
    • FireBeyond 8y ago
      Not true at all. Paramedics can declare death (at least in most states, I cannot speak to all), and we _absolutely_ can stop resuscitation efforts using our clinical judgment, at times in concert with a physician. I am not sure of the specifics of this case, but traumatic cardiac arrest is, as a generalization, "largely unsurvivable". An asystole EKG, in concert with the mechanism of injury, may be enough for us to do so, and we do not need to transport what is at that point a dead person (even if there is resuscitation being attempted, for a multitude of reasons - sometimes even "for the family's benefit"[1]) just to get them to a physician to declare death. In many states, EMTs (with ~200hrs of medical training) are able to declare death legally, in the setting of evisceration of heart/brain, decapitation, "body position incompatible with life". This is the situation to the best of my knowledge as a paramedic of nine years and a state certified EMS Instructor and Evaluator. [1] it should be noted that this is done in a setting where its judged the "best" course of action for grief, establishing end of life directives, and the like, and _not_ as something that is intended to falsely convey hope.
  • Amezarak 8y ago
    Modern cars are remarkably safe. I've been in a very high speed head-on collision in a Honda and not only survived, but was completely uninjured other than some whiplash.