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Two people killed in fiery Tesla crash with no one driving
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- camjohnson26 6y agoIt was only a matter of time, no one was driving the car.
- DSingularity 6y agoI thought hey had systems to ensure that an attentive human was in the driver seat. Someone found a way to circumvent this?
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y agoThe system detects torque on the steering wheel: you can find various hacks online to fake the input.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- blamazon 6y agoFor anyone else wondering why this is notable: “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.”
- faitswulff 6y agoI found this notable as well: > Authorities said they used 32,000 gallons of water over four hours to extinguish the flames because the vehicle’s batteries kept reigniting. At one point, Herman said, deputies had to call Tesla to ask them how to put out the fire in the battery.
- fallingknife 6y agoSome "authorities" they are. Took me about 5 seconds to find the answer. Not one person thought to Google it?
- robin_reala 6y agoMaybe in a situation like that, going by the first search engine result isn’t the best idea?
- mikestew 6y agoI would expect professionals to have this information in cache. I’ve been driving a production BEV for ten years, this isn’t exactly new-fangled.
- fallingknife 6y agoBetter than going with the first result out of your head (pour water on it) which is what they did.
- camjohnson26 6y agoWhich turns out to be the right answer.
- jvolkman 6y agoThe first result for my query says "copious amounts of water are recommended as the best means to extinguish a high voltage vehicle fire." What did you find?
- fallingknife 6y agohttps://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=how+to+extinguish+a+lithium+battery+fire https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=how+to+...
- bin_bash 6y agoI’m confused how this is possible. I have a 2020 Tesla and you have to turn the wheel every couple of minutes while Autopilot is on otherwise it will just turn off after beeping a ton.
- spockz 6y agoIt is perfectly possible to nudge the steering wheel from the passenger side.
- ekianjo 6y agoTesla has not thought of incorporating a sensor to ensure that someone is actually behind the wheel and not at the side of the wheel? I would find that unlikely.
- jasonwatkinspdx 6y agoWell, you'd be mistaken. The only use the torque sensor in the steering wheel. There've been news articles with Tesla engineers asking for a better system, and Musk's explicit response was that technology like eye tracking or such would be ineffective.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- zaroth 6y agoAutoPilot will also disable if you unbuckle your seatbelt or lift your butt off the seat.
- jasonwatkinspdx 6y agoIt's easy to fool, and it appears these two folks were doing so deliberately.
- api 6y ago
- gumby 6y agoRapture.
- camjohnson26 6y agoI’m sure the Tesla crowd will jump in to say this is driver error because Tesla has a disclaimer that the feature requires active driver supervision, but the problem has always been the marketing that causes users to over estimate the system’s capabilities. Musk says that autopilot is safer than human driven miles, but this is apples and oranges since the human driven miles include city driving and all models of car, which have much higher rates of accidents than luxury cars like Teslas. Full Self Driving’s marketing has been criminal. Tesla is trying to solve self driving without lidar, which it’s competitors are using. Waymo is way ahead of Tesla, but they create the illusion of being ahead by releasing features that are clearly extremely dangerous. This video is a little over the top but highlights the abuses of FSD marketing better than anything else I’ve seen: https://twitter.com/FinanceLancelot/status/1375289872756273152?s=20 https://twitter.com/FinanceLancelot/status/13752898727562731...
- ajross 6y agoI don't see how autopilot was involved here. This was a tiny cul de sac (the address is in the article). Autopilot simply won't achieve the kind of speeds needed to cause that collision. Frankly I agree with other posters here that the most likely scenario is that there was a human driver in the seemingly-undamaged drivers' seat who fled the scene. Absent that, you'd have to play games with launch mode or some kind of device to press the accellerator. You just can't do this with autopilot as I see it.
- camjohnson26 6y agoIf so the investigators on the scene are wrong, from the article: “Herman said authorities believe no one else was in the car and that it burst into flames immediately. He said it he believes it wasn’t being driven by a human. Harris County Constable Precinct 4 deputies said the vehicle was traveling at a high speed when it failed to negotiate a cul-de-sac turn, ran off the road and hit the tree.”
- ajross 6y agoAgain, that scenario (taking a high speed turn in a cul-de-sac) just doesn't correspond to any known accessible autopilot behavior. Given the choice between "initial investigation was wrong" and "heretofore unseen high speed residential driving by autopilot" (also "non-autopilot driving from passenger seat" probably needs to be in the list), I know which way Occam points. To be glib: if you could get the car to drive itself at 60mph+ on a residential street, that shit would be all over youtube.
- Black101 6y agoAlso: > Authorities said they used 32,000 gallons of water to extinguish the flames because the vehicle’s batteries kept reigniting. At one point, Herman said, deputies had to call Tesla to ask them how to put out the fire in the battery.
- sbassi 6y agohttps://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/downloads/2020_Lithium-Ion_Battery_Emergency_Response_Guide_en.pdf https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/downloads/2020_Lit...
- Black101 6y agolol: > Tesla’s recommendation is to fight a Tesla Energy Product fire defensively. The fire crew should maintain a safe distance and allow the battery to burn itself out.
- NoPicklez 6y agoHow the heck was the car driving itself with nobody in the drivers seat? Surely that's a minimal requirement the car must pass before it engages autopilot.
- bostonsre 6y agoI've been wondering about that too.. could have sworn that was the case. The front end damage from the tree looks minimal, have been wondering if the driver was drunk, the car crashed, he didn't think it was going to burst into flames, so he got in the back seat and buckled in to try to avoid getting arrested. Or maybe they were screwing around and the driver changed seats, then it crashed?
- NoPicklez 6y agoThat seems fairly plausible, the driver got into the backseat hoping that it could be claimed they weren't actually driving.
- mlindner 6y agoIt's not physically possible. The car can't be operated with no one in the driver's seat. Autopilot shuts off automatically. Further, it was in a cul-de-sac, some place autopilot doesn't operate.
- mlindner 6y agoIt's not physically possible. The car can't be operated with no one in the driver's seat. Autopilot shuts off automatically.
- jtchang 6y agoIs not using water to fight a lithium fire not a good idea?
- JKCalhoun 6y agoWhat is though? My first thought was halon gas but I think you still have outrageously hot temperatures in the cells that will reignite after the halon has dissipated.
- javajosh 6y agoPut a large bell jar over the car and then pump out all the air? Or maybe pump liquid silicone into the battery compartment? (The theory there is you need a flame-retardant 'foam' at very high temp but you could submerge the battery compartment in...something like silicone, to isolate it from atmosphere; there would be heat as the batteries discharge, but no combustion.
- blamazon 6y agoWhen it comes to extinguishing fire, you play the cards you have to mitigate the situation. If what you have is a residential fire hydrant system that can supply 36,000 gallons, you use water in overwhelming force. As evidenced by the article, it will not quell the reaction but it will dampen the overall thermal situation enough to permit humans to be extracted safely. Presumably it would have been better to dump a few thousand pounds of sand on it but there are few sand hydrants in USA residential neighborhoods.
- hallway_monitor 6y agoThinking about a sand hydrant is the most entertaining thing I've done all day!
- SamBam 6y agoUgh, for me it just takes me back to the horrifyingly frightening miniseries Chernobyl.
- everdrive 6y ago"Authorities said they used 32,000 gallons of water over four hours to extinguish the flames because the vehicle’s batteries kept reigniting. At one point, Herman said, deputies had to call Tesla to ask them how to put out the fire in the battery." Wow. Have there been other electric car fires which are so difficult to put out?
- JKCalhoun 6y agoI was under the impression they are all this difficult to put out. But maybe it depends on how many cells ruptured. Hitting a tree dead center is going to take out a lot of cells I guess.
- camjohnson26 6y agoThere have been many situations like this, including cars reigniting days later. Also a few cases of cars randomly catching fire while parked: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-tesla-cars-catch-on-fire-2019-4?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/why-tesla-cars-catch-on-fire...
- o_p 6y agoThis is even worse than the deadly autopilot, EV cars are much more likely to burn and the fire is much hard to extinguish, but no one who tries to sell you an EV will tell you "hey you are more likely to die by being burned alive!"
- matwood 6y ago> Wow. Have there been other electric car fires which are so difficult to put out? (In)famously the electric super car that Richard Hammond crashed. The Rimec One Concept car is all-electric. Hammond's model was left destroyed and took five days to fully extinguish https://www.thesun.co.uk/motors/5092851/richard-hammond-crash-footage-shows-grand-tour-presenter-screaming-cp-as-supercar-flips-and-rolls-down-hill/ https://www.thesun.co.uk/motors/5092851/richard-hammond-cras...
- atarian 6y agoReminds me of a separate incident, where the fire department ended up dunking the Tesla in a container of water to prevent re-ignition: https://electrek.co/2019/06/01/tesla-fire-supercharger/ https://electrek.co/2019/06/01/tesla-fire-supercharger/
- wyldfire 6y agoMy car gets irritated that I let go of the steering wheel for a few seconds. I've never dared to see how it reacts to a continued violation but presumably it could disengage the gas or engage the brakes. Doesn't Tesla have some kind of seat or steering wheel sensor to prevent this? Could the owner have defeated the checks somehow?
- ajross 6y agoThey do have a steering wheel sensor. And yes, it can be defeated. Per the article this happened on a cul de sac in a residential neighborhood. My question is how on earth they managed to get the vehicle to a fatal speed in that environment (seriously: Google the address, there's almost no runway available). It seems likely they were playing with launch mode and not autopilot, or perhaps manually messing with the accelerator from the passenger seat. This definitely doesn't smell like an "autopilot" failure, though we'll have to wait for details. (In fact as others are pointing out based on the location of the damage: it actually seems not unlikely that there was a human driver who fled the scene.)
- ethagknight 6y agoWell Teslas are known for their incredible acceleration, and then if the occupants weren’t wearing seatbelts, even a relatively low speed crash can cause severe injury.
- ajross 6y agoTesla autopilot doesn't exploit that, though. The question is how they launched the car, and how they managed to launch it into a tree. You just can't do that with autopilot to my eyes.
- camjohnson26 6y agoHow fast would they need to be going for this to be fatal? I could definitely see autopilot missing this turn and crashing into the tree, and it’s possible they were trapped inside rather than killed on impact.
- zorpner 6y agoBodes well for the narrow tunnel with no egress meant for these cars to self-drive in.
- williesleg 6y agoHoly crap! Those teslas catch fire a lot more than gas cars!
- MarkusWandel 6y agoMy first thought on seeing the tree in the right front quarter of the car and the fact that the driver's seat area is uncrushed, is that there was a third person, who departed the scene. I'm guessing whatever data the car collected to tell one way or the other perished along with the electronics. But don't these cars also upload telemetry all the time?
- sml156 6y agoFrom the article >The owner, he said, backed out of the driveway, and then may have hopped in the back seat only to crash a few hundred yards down the road. He said the owner was found in the back seat upright. My first thought was they were making a YouTube video
- jasonwatkinspdx 6y agoYup, that or just showing off a sort of autopilot variation of ghost ride the whip to his buddy. Really sad and dumb reason to die.
- kaba0 6y agoWasn’t there a recent article posted here how safe Teslas are?
- JUNGLEISMASSIVE 6y agoYes and that is why this accident was staged.
- kaba0 6y agoOccam’s razor
- JUNGLEISMASSIVE 6y agoIt's more fun to not shave once in a while. (in reference to suspension of disbelief)
- camjohnson26 6y agodang or other moderators, can someone add the official title to this post? It’s unclear from the submission’s title that no one was driving the car, which is the only thing that makes this post notable.
- jvolkman 6y agoMaybe Tesla can help design some portable wall/dam system that could be setup around vehicles to capture water used in a pool rather than have it all immediately lost to drainage.
- andybak 6y ago> Two men are dead after a Tesla traveling in Spring crashed into a tree [...] What do they mean "traveling in Spring"? Is it the name of a place? That sentence is rather baffling to my ears.
- lwl 6y agoIt's the name of a city just north of Houston.
- Hamuko 6y agoTexas seems to have very silly names for places. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West,_Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West,_Texas (not to be confused with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Texas)
- banana_giraffe 6y agoYep, The three others I know of are Center, Texas, which is not in fact in the center of Texas; Earth, Texas, which I suppose is in fact on the Earth; and Texas City, Texas, which is indeed a city in Texas.
- cbozeman 6y agoMeanwhile... in Austria... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugging,_Upper_Austria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugging,_Upper_Austria
- tsomctl 6y ago> The company dissolved its press office and doesn’t usually respond to media inquiries, however. Well, that's one way to solve the problem.
- mimixco 6y agoI live in this neighborhood and it's easy to see how you could get a Tesla up to high speed and quickly encounter a tight turn. The entire area is full of that kind of layout. It's all long roads with curves around trees.
- samfisher83 6y agoI think it was more people doing stupid things than the environment since no one was driving the car. I wonder how old the people in the car where. Also they need to stop calling this thing autopilot.
- avereveard 6y agoso, aren't tesla coming with an attention system and aren't tesla autopilots allowed on the pubblic road to the condition that a driver is always attentive? I'd say there have been enough death from inattentive drivers and it's about time the legislators and licensing bodies start looking into the issue.
- d4l3k 6y agoThey measure torque on the wheel from the drivers hand. It is possible to fool via defeat devices etc (ex www dot autopilotbuddy dot com). There is a WIP system that uses the selfie camera to monitor the driver but it's still possible to fool (image taped in front or block it with tape etc) so unlikely it can catch all cases of drivers being willfully being dangerous. https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1379928419136339969 https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1379928419136339969
- dctoedt 6y agoBack in the 1970s, I heard a story (from my dad, a USAF officer) about a young officer in a foreign air force, from a wealthy family, who was in U.S. pilot training in San Antonio. Supposedly the young gentleman bought a tricked-out van, with a bar and a bed and everything. He got onto the freeway, put the van on cruise control, and went into the back to mix a drink. Fortunately, no one else was injured in the ensuing crash that killed him. (I have no idea whether the story is true and am disinclined to research it.)
- pwinnski 6y agoThis was a common urban legend when I was a kid, updated periodically to make the ignorant driver different nationalities.
- wlesieutre 6y agohttps://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cruise-uncontrol/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cruise-uncontrol/
- mlazos 6y agoThe more I read Elon’s responses to these things, the less I feel like he actually cares. Elon’s response for me translates to “It’s not a misunderstanding of the name, it’s a misunderstanding if the name by experienced users” In the end the name Autopilot is a really cool name, but it is by actual definition misleading af. Given I don’t think Tesla’s cars are inherently more dangerous, it just seems like people think Autopilot is more than it is, experienced or not. They absolutely should implement features to make sure the driver is at least in the seat!!
- sneak 6y agoThose features exist. The article mentions that it is not specified whether or not the driver assist features were even in use in this instance. > One of the men killed was in the front passenger seat of the car, the other was in the back seat, according to KHOU. Harris County Precinct 4 Constable Mark Herman told KPRC that “no one was driving” the fully-electric 2019 Tesla at the time of the crash. It’s not yet clear whether the car had its Autopilot driver assist system activated.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoHow would the car still be moving forward if driver assist was not in use?
- inglor_cz 6y agoBrakes deactivated and rolling downhill? IDK if this is even possible in Teslas or if there is a safety mechanism that prevents it.
- matsemann 6y agoFriend of mine thought they activated the driver assist and let go of the steering wheel, only to go straight and off the road in the next curve of the road.. Had only activated cruise control or so.
- deleted 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- throwawayboise 6y agoTwo men ... nobody driving. This is a "hold my beer and watch this" accident.
- userbinator 6y agoFeels like a stupid reenactment of this Simpsons scene from two decades ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29ToNp1MY3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29ToNp1MY3c
- Hypocritelefty 6y agoTwo guys died because fraud Karen sells vapurware but the Tesla shills on hackernews selling it as not a tesla problem.
- dijit 6y agoArticle says it’s unconfirmed whether the car was in auto-drive. Part of me (without any knowledge) thinks someone was showing off the auto-drive and turned it off accidentally. But more details will come out I hope. One thing in particular sticks out as concerning: the fire service did not know how to deal with the fire. That’s not something specific to Tesla, Tesla does not make all battery powered cars, the fire service should know how to suppress electrical fires.
- Nacdor 6y ago> “[Investigators] are 100-percent certain that no one was in the driver seat driving that vehicle at the time of impact,” Harris County Precinct 4 Constable Mark Herman said. “They are positive.” This would only be possible if they were using the autopilot feature. > the fire service did not know how to deal with the fire. Tesla's advice is "let it burn": > Tesla’s guidance suggests it’s better to let the fire burn out than continuing to try to put it out.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> This would only be possible if they were using the autopilot feature. I thought autopilot had a safety feature to prevent no-driver operation, though there is a “SmartSummon” feature intended for parking lots which does not (but requires continuous press of a fob button.) So, there’s no way this should be possible, absent a major malfunction to even allow self-driving in the reported condition.
- Nacdor 6y agoAccording to multiple Tesla owners in another thread, Autopilot will continue to drive as long as the seatbelt is buckled. There doesn't need to be weight in the driver's seat.
- ec109685 6y agoAuto pilot immediately switches off if it doesn’t sense pressure in the seat, which would result it tons of beeping and the car slowing down and moving to side of road.
- decafninja 6y agoHanging out in a Tesla online community, I've noticed there are two types of Tesla fans (and investors even). The first are those that believe that EVs are the future and love the cars Tesla is producing. The other are robotaxi/FSD evangelists and believe Tesla will usher in the age of autonomous cars sooner rather than later. These people genuinely believe we'll have fully road legal autonomous cars (as in, requiring zero human input) by 2025 and that human driven cars will be outright banned in many developed countries by 2035 or even 2030. Some of them actually want Tesla to stop selling cars to the public in favor of stocking them for the robotaxi fleet which they are absolutely sure will be widely deployed in a matter of a few years.
- jacquesm 6y agoThere are two types of people: those who divide people into groups and those that don't. Seriously though: there are many more Tesla fans, there are also those that hope the company succeeds but that wished that that self driving feature had been postponed until it actually worked because in the longer term this is bad for the brand and bad for electrics as a whole.
- decafninja 6y agoDon't get me wrong - I too am a Tesla fan, and my next car will most likely be one too. And disclaimer: I also own stock. But yeah, I wish both Elon and the rabid FSD evangelists would quiet down and stop hyping FSD and robotaxi. I agree that hyping it right here and now today is going to hurt the brand more than help. The bad attention is already happening. You hear about any other company making incremental advances in autonomous vehicle tech, and it's generally met positively. News about greater, more significant, advances from Tesla, are met with second guessing, doubts, and worries about how many people will get hurt.
- heavyset_go 6y agoRegarding the latter group, this video[1] that was archived by an HN user[2] is pretty telling. [1] https://troll.tv/videos/watch/54bc7bd0-8691-4359-aa7d-dc5148350ff3 https://troll.tv/videos/watch/54bc7bd0-8691-4359-aa7d-dc5148... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26810351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26810351
- websites2323 6y agoSomething in this story doesn’t add up. There is no implementation of AutoPilot on Tesla cars that doesn’t require intervention by the driver every 15 seconds. Perhaps the driver undid their seat belt and reached behind to get something and was then thrown from his seat elsewhere?
- mimixco 6y agoI live in this area, which is highly wooded and full of curvy roads. It would be a cinch to crash into a tree here in 2 or 3 seconds. It wouldn't take 15.
- vesinisa 6y agoTFA doesn't agree: > The company’s cars only check that attention with a sensor that measures torque in the steering wheel, though, leaving room for misuse So they could have held the steering wheel from the passanger seat. > Tesla CEO Elon Musk has rejected calls from Tesla engineers to add better safety monitoring when a vehicle is in Autopilot, such as eye-tracking cameras or additional sensors on the steering wheel, saying the tech is “ineffective.” In my country there was recently an event where a Tesla on Autopilot crashed out with the driver fast asleep behind the wheel. I'd say regulation to make it mandatory to install fool proof safety tech ensuring the driver is actively observing the traffic is needed, and fast. And this tech is trivial compared to even semi-autonomous driving, no matter what Musk is claiming.
- websites2323 6y ago> So they could have held the steering wheel from the passanger seat. We don’t have the diagnostic information that indicates AP was engaged. So, which is more likely: driver error and no seatbelt, or driver sitting in the passenger seat? I contend the latter is extremely unlikely, since there would be basically no benefit to doing this given the requirements of AP currently. It’s possible the driver was pulling a stunt. In which case, the deaths are attributable to deliberate misuse, no different than “ghost riding the whip”
- buran77 6y ago> Authorities tried to contact Tesla for advice on putting out the fire; it’s not clear whether they received any response. This will become a massive issue in the years to come unless we find a way not only to drastically reduce the number of crashes but also massively improve reliability. High voltage battery fires are probably the worst kind of fire a regular emergency responder would have to deal with, between the hard to put out fire and the risk of electric shock. It also causes some massive damage to the surroundings (the actual road surface, surrounding cars, or any garage unfortunate to house the car at that time). Today very few emergency responders are even trained to properly deal with such a fire, and it's a topic really lagging behind everywhere compared to the rate EVs are popping up on the streets.
- testfoobar 6y agoThermal runaway in Lithium-ion battery packs is one reason that I don't ever want an EV parked inside my garage. These fires are hard to put out.
- samatman 6y agoI'm not really seeing a scenario where an out-of-control car fire has worse results in a garage for gasoline vs. lithium ion. In both cases it's an absolutely massive thermal conflagration, with no hope of putting it out using anything a homeowner has on hand, and it will proceed so rapidly that the house is going to be totaled by the time the fire department shows up. I have to figure this is just bias toward the familiar. I will grant you that I don't refill an ICE car inside my own garage, so maybe charging genuinely makes the electric more dangerous. But it probably doesn't do so in fact, I would guess in both cases the biggest risk is something like leaving rags soaked in linseed oil and getting spontaneous combustion.
- HWR_14 6y agoI haven't heard of any ICE engines spontaneously combusting. I have heard of many lithium batteries, primarily in phones, combusting. We're better at keeping gasoline safe than charged electrical energy.
- jollybean 6y ago“They just get too used to it. That tends to be more of an issue. It’s not a lack of understanding of what Autopilot can do. It’s [drivers] thinking they know more about Autopilot than they do.” Hmm, that seems like a rather stark contradiction. Elon I think has some character flaws and when people are dying it's not the time to be defensive. I'm one of the least naturally empathetic people I know and yet I wouldn't be talking about anything other than condolences. Finally he can't continue to defend the term 'autopilot' - in Public Communications, you're talking the masses, the lowest common denominator, and the 'laziest mode' of even high functioning people - you gotta use words that will shape outcomes. 'Autopilot' is just a bad choice - he needs to change it.
- dm319 6y agoI agree. People here will cite the aviation term not refering to autonomous flying, but if you ask a regular person in the street, they think that Tesla's are self-driving. This is a dangerous belief that is held by a lot of people and needs to change. However, Tesla knows this adds an intriguing cachet to the brand, so they seem reluctant to downplay it.
- freerobby 6y agoIt doesn't matter what a "regular person in the street" thinks, from a safety standpoint. What matters is what Tesla owners think (i.e. the people driving the cars). Are they fooled by the term? Search around on TMC, /r/teslamotors, or any other owners group, and you'll find it's pretty universally understood. Additionally, the car reminds you of its limitations every time you use it. And it disables if it doesn't detect torque on the steering wheel, or weight in your seat, or the seatbelt clipped in. I understand how someone could be mislead by marketing early in the buying process. But by the time you get to operating the vehicle, it is borderline impossible to use Autopilot and still believe it requires no human attention.
- kube-system 6y agoNot sure that these guys are in the reddit demographic... but regardless, Tesla intends their cars to be a mass-market product. Peer pressure is a thing, and many of the people who buy these cars are showing them off to their friends who are eager to see the "autopilot" in action. When people are given conflicting information, they'll believe the story they want to believe. ("that fine print is just stuff the lawyers put in there") While drivers have the ultimate responsibility for sure, the situation this perception has created is foreseeable. https://abc7ny.com/amp/tesla-crash-houston-fatal-car-autopilot/10525981/ https://abc7ny.com/amp/tesla-crash-houston-fatal-car-autopil... > two men who were found dead inside the car had dropped off their wives at a nearby home and told them they were going to take the 2019 Tesla S class for a test ride. > The man, ages 59 and 69, had been talking about the features on the car before they left.
- Quarrelsome 6y ago> Tesla has previously cautioned its customers that Autopilot is not an autonomous driving system Then why the fuck did you call it autopilot then? Are we trying to prove that bad marketing can kill people or something?
- quasarj 6y agoSo, I'm confused about this argument. What do people think airplane autopilot does? Do they think it takes off, lands, navigates, and avoids unexpected obstacles in its path? Like honestly, people do know actual autopilot doesn't do any of that, right???
- toast0 6y agoOf course the autopilot doesn't land the plane; that's what the autoland system is for. Autoland has been available on some planes since the 1970s. Not a whole lot of unexpected obstacles in most flight paths to avoid either. However, collision avoidance systems are available, I don't think they're commonly connected to the flight controls directly though (I could easily be wrong though, I only fly an armchair)
- Quarrelsome 6y agothe term is literally: automatic pilot. So in the context of a car? Yes, I would expect it to navigate turnings and other obstacles.
- discodave 6y agoBecause that's how they sell cars, and nobody has gone to jail yet.
- ChrisClark 6y agoThey should change the name, but the name is correct, because that's what autopilot means. But because everyone has the wrong definition of autopilot in their mind, they really should rename it. It's the right term, but that term has evolved in the public's mind and shouldn't be used anymore even though it's accurate.
- oivey 6y agoIt seems like Tesla should at least have a safety feature that checks if someone is in the drivers seat. Cars already do this for warnings about seatbelts and enabling the air bags. Maybe the sensor is already even there.
- ChrisClark 6y agoThey do, I mentioned in another comment I once unhooked my belt to take my jacket off while in auto pilot. It started beeping horribly, disabled autopilot and started slowing down. It then wouldn't even let me re-enable it until after stopping and putting it into park. I've heard it does the same with the seat sensor.
- freerobby 6y agoWhy is this comment downvoted? It is 100% correct.
- motohagiography 6y agoWe should rethink this as figuring out how to make self-crashing cars less efficient to a point above a ROC curve.
- dm319 6y agoWhen automation does a 95% job, sometimes it isn't worthwhile using it because of the overrides required for the extra 5%. If you require full concentration while using driving assist, it might actually be easier to just drive the car regularly or you'll struggle to maintain that ability to intervene immediately when required.
- slver 6y agoWhen you deliberately rig your car so the driver seat can be empty, yeah those extra 5% suddenly become a very tall mountain. Sane people can work with the software so they complement each other. People make mistakes, the software makes mistakes. Both together make fewer mistakes. If you start watching shows or playing games on your phone, or sleeping, that won't happen.
- dm319 6y agoLet's say your car has a problem with a slip road in a particular bit of road you are about to hit in about 30 mins. If on autopilot, it will start to take the slip road, but confuse the hard shoulder with a lane, crashing into the barrier. If you have spent the last 30 minutes trying to stay awake because you have practically no input into the driving, you might not be alert enough to avert the accident. If you've been driving, not only would you be alert enough, but you also wouldn't have been in that situation.
- djohnston 6y agoMaybe, but let's be clear that right now investigators think this driver was in the backseat. These are interesting conjectures but not at all related to the crash at hand.
- dm319 6y agoOh sure, if that's true, then this case doesn't really show anything. But, I was talking more generally about the term 'autopilot' and its benefits. My example used a 2018 crash where the autopilot half took a slip road [1] [1] https://www.carthrottle.com/post/tesla-defends-autopilot-again-after-a-fatal-model-x-crash/ https://www.carthrottle.com/post/tesla-defends-autopilot-aga...
- vladoh 6y agoSome people are quoting the recent Tesla safety report [1] as evidence that Autopilot is on average much safer than a human driver. This is a classic case of the Simpson's Paradox [2]. On the first look it seems that Autopilot is 4x safer than driving without any safety features (1 accident every 4.19 million miles vs 0.978 million miles). However, the data used to compute the stats is different in two important ways: 1. Autopilot cannot be always activated. This means that is some particularly difficult situations, the driver needs to drive himself. These are more dangerous situations in general. 2. If a driver disengages Autopilot to avoid an accident and engages it again straight away on a 10 miles drive, then you will have 9.99 miles driven on Autopilot without accident. The statistic misses the cases where the human driver intervened to avoid an accident. This means that we are comparing the same measure (accidents) on different datasets and therefore in different conditions. This is dangerous, because it may lead us to wrong and often opposite conclusions (see Simpson's Paradox [2]). I'm not saying that Autopilot isn't safer than a human driver, given that the driver is at the steering wheel and alert, but that this data doesn't lead to that conclusion. If the driver is not sitting at the driver seat, then it is certainly much more dangerous. [1] https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
- jacquesm 6y agoThe marketing and messaging around auto-pilot simultaneously argues that auto-pilot is safer than a human driver but blames the driver when there is an accident.
- smnrchrds 6y agoHeads I win, tails you lose. What's so difficult to understand? /s
- josephcsible 6y agoA human and Autopilot working together is safer than just a human driving. Autopilot by itself is currently less safe than just a human driving (which is why it's still level 2). There's no mixed messaging.
- cjohansson 6y ago"Ah I see they died, we released a bug fix for those scenarios yesterday, just make sure to update before going on your holiday trip."
- o_p 6y agoWhy would someone use autopilot when Tesla is not liable for damages? Its like you hire a driver but you are liable for any crash they do.
- matz1 6y agoTo make driving more relaxing. Instead of actively driving you switch to be a driving supervisor instead. Think about it as a really advance cruise control. Autopilot doesn't mean it won't crash, thats absurd.
- Google234 6y agoThere is something called personal responsibility that most people believe in. We aren’t children. You could ask that question about literally anything that you buy that could potential kill you.
- andrepd 6y agoThat doesn't apply to cars, which have the potential to kill anyone who shares the road with you (or people on crosswalks, the sidewalk, cafés, inside shops, etc). So it is my business that you drive safely.
- o_p 6y ago>There is something called personal responsibility that most people believe in. If you are talking about the personal responsability of Elon Musk by misleading the public into thinking his cars have anything close to a self driving car, I agree. If autopilot is not autopilot, then why name it as such?
- ominous_prime 6y agoBecause it is similar to an actual autopilot. Aircraft autopilots are also not fully-autonomous, and basically just follow a predetermined course.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
- freewizard 6y agoI’m wondering how often does Elon Musk use autopilot? If he does not do that all the time, users should not either; if he does, I’m worried about him and Tesla share holders.
- GiorgioG 6y agoI would be shocked if he drove at all. His time is worth more than that whatever it costs to hire a driver.
- reasonabl_human 6y agoA coworker at KSC saw him driving in through the South Gate in a large black Bentley, rocking out behind the steering wheel, so apparently he’s not always being driven around / in a Tesla!
- echelon 6y agoWould the two have survived in an ICE car? The car doesn't appear to be wrapped around the tree, and the body looks intact. It looks like the battery fire killed them.
- haecceity 6y agoHow fast was the car going? Why how did they die? Did seatbelts and airbags fail?
- itisit 6y ago6 deaths from Autopilot now. At the very least, Tesla ought to drop the name. https://www.tesladeaths.com/ https://www.tesladeaths.com/
- ominous_prime 6y agoIf anything the name is the most accurate part of the marketing. My Garmin autopilot will gladly fly me straight into the ground if given the chance to do so. While they are getting more advanced, aircraft autopilots are even less autonomous. But yes, their marketing is aimed at making people think it’s a self-driving feature.
- icapulet2 6y agoThat's without counting for the Houston deaths as the use of FSD/Autopilot hasn't been verified.
- irrational 6y agoDid the car start driving with nobody in the driver's seat? Or did someone move out of the driver's seat after it started?
- ztjio 6y agoThe car won't even go into Drive without weight in the driver seat. These people had to put a lot of effort into making this happen.
- SEJeff 6y agoYou can see from the red brake calipers for his is a performance model. I wonder if it was a Model S or a Model 3. The newer Tesla battery packs have put serious work into heat dispersion and preventing thermal runaway like this.
- worik 6y ago"Auotpilot" Elon Musk is a lying toad.
- fguerraz 6y agoThe article only has "beliefs" for evidence. Obviously a great piece of journalism...
- trhway 6y agorace cars (and tanks and submarines - closed areas with high chance of fire and/or catastrophic consequences of fire) have automated fire suppression system. I wonder if EVs need to have one too. Right now the EV fires in the accidents call for memories of 196x movies where ICE cars would burst on fire in accidents. It was solved for ICE cars and need to be solved for EVs too - looking at those accidents, specifically at the damage from impact and thus related speed/etc. - it seems that the fire killed the people not the impact itself (i myself been in an accident in a regular ICE car where front of the car got smashed while we inside, being seatbelted of course, got only bruises, and if the car burst into flames the outcome would be completely different)
- camjohnson26 6y agoNew information released says it was a 2019 Model S and the 2 men were talking about the car’s features with their wives before they took it for a test drive. Police believe the vehicle was on autopilot and traveling at a high rate of speed at the time of the crash. https://abc7ny.com/amp/tesla-crash-houston-fatal-car-autopilot/10525981 https://abc7ny.com/amp/tesla-crash-houston-fatal-car-autopil...
- carlhjerpe 6y agoVehicles with self driving capabilities should in my opinion be required by law to have black boxes like the ones from jetliners. And the tools to read the data must be given to the the government.
- ogre_codes 6y agoTeslas do have black boxes. Whether they would survive a fire like this is questionable though. Tesla's "black box" data is obtainable like any other kind of crime scene evidence, via court order.
- ineedasername 6y agoWow, that fire must have been intense. I have never seen so little left of a car. Is that from the battery fire?
- markdown 6y agoWhy does the car move when there's nobody in the driver seat? Shouldn't a sensor have stopped the car?
- tyingq 6y agoWhat's really odd is that it happened about midway onto a very short ( < 300 meters) dead-end, cul-de-sac street where you have to take a hard right turn to enter. The address of the place is in the story...look at it on a map. Really odd.
- maxharris 6y agoPeople are commenting on this story without the benefit of all of the necessary facts. 1) Autopilot will not activate without lane lines on the road 2) FSD will not activate without lane lines either 3) The car was not equipped with FSD software 4) There were no lane lines on the road where this happened https://twitter.com/WholeMarsBlog/status/1383855271710056460 https://twitter.com/WholeMarsBlog/status/1383855271710056460
- josephcsible 6y agoNitpick: there's a difference between "will not activate" and "will deactivate if it was already active". (For the record, my opinion is that this was entirely the driver's fault and not Tesla's fault at all.)
- mrtksn 6y agoSo what's the conclusion here? Who needs to do the double check? The coroner, because the event did not happen thus the passengers are alive and stationary due to lack of a driver or the fire department because there's a driver on the drivers seat but they missed it?
- tyingq 6y agoTo me, there's lots of possibilities. Driver couldn't open the door after the crash, so moved to either the passenger or back seat to try and escape...but failed. Or, third person was driving, fled the scene on foot. Both kind of unlikely. But how likely is it that they circumvented the seat belt, put a weight on the seat, and kept torque on the wheel, and then engaged autopilot? Whatever happened here is going to be something weird and unusual.
- mrtksn 6y agoOf course a full investigation is needed but it seems like a good case to use Occam's razor. People with Tesla's often use defeating devices to overcome the measures against unsafe use, there are many videos on Youtube of people doing just that. It's colloquially known that people are attaching small weights etc in order to do that, pretty basic stuff. Also software often has bugs, it's known for Tesla to release software under the "not ready for daily use, use at own risk" pretext. There are also previous known crashes due to the failure of Autopilot as well as videos showing failure of Autopilot where crashes were avoided thanks to human driver sitting in the drivers seat. The other alternative is that these people acted unreasonably, crashed the car, failed to exit but changed seats before perish and the professionals who reported in and investigated the situation couldn't tell that. Which one is more likely o have happened?
- de6u99er 6y ago>The owner, he said, backed out of the driveway, and then may have hopped in the back seat only to crash a few hundred yards down the road. He said the owner was found in the back seat upright. How is it possible, that the car doesn't stop immediately as soon ad there's noone in the driver seat?
- robben1234 6y agoIt's the age of stupid smart vehicles. My favorite is 2018 Panamera heading into the sea[0] with no one at the driver's seat during a test. [0] RU - https://youtu.be/nKMk3q7bHjA?t=564 https://youtu.be/nKMk3q7bHjA?t=564
- de6u99er 6y agoWow, someone would think smart cars would be smart enough to detect if someone is in the driver seat. In case of the article's Tesla, they must have put some weight into the drivers seat or the owner has somehow hacked the weight sensor.
- mmmmmk 6y agoI still wonder why Tesla doesn't use lithium ferrophosphate or another type of battery that won't catch fire. Shouldn't the safety risk of the batteries they use outweigh the slight increase in energy density?
- jmcguckin 6y agoEvolution in action!
- qshaman 6y agoI wonder how many more people have to die before Tesla actually fixes it. Is either self driving or not, there is not such a thing as "supervised driving"(that's called driving), I also wonder if those people saying -actually, this link over here says self driving is safer....- will say the same if a family member die because of the "self driving" mode not working properly.
- ineedasername 6y agoDoes anyone have any idea of how easily (or how difficult) it is for an EV battery fire to occur vs. a traditional combustion engine?
- utopcell 6y agoFrom [1]: Bloomberg asked Urmson about Tesla's Autopilot technology—and particularly Elon Musk's claim that Tesla vehicles will soon be capable of operating as driverless taxis. “It’s just not going to happen,” Urmson said. “It’s technically very impressive what they’ve done, but we were doing better in 2010.” That's a reference to Urmson's time at Google. Google started recruiting DARPA Grand Challenge veterans around 2009. Within a couple of years, Google's engineers had built a basic self-driving car that was capable of navigating a variety of roads around the San Francisco Bay Area. A couple of years later, Google started letting employees use experimental self-driving cars for highway commutes—an application much like today's Autopilot. Google considered licensing this technology to automakers for freeway driving. But the technology required active driver supervision. Urmson and other Google engineers decided there was too great a risk that drivers would become overly reliant on the technology and fail to monitor it adequately, leading to unnecessary deaths. [1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/04/the-largest-independent-self-driving-startup-is-under-a-lot-of-pressure/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/04/the-largest-independent...
- djohnston 6y agoDoes failing to monitor adequately include jumping in the back seat? There's inattentiveness and reckless endangerment, I think the driver here should be charged tbh.
- utopcell 6y agoI think the point is that the driver was fully confident that the car would do a much better job at driving compared to them.
- ffggvv 6y agois it reckless endangerment when elon constantly tells people to do this and says theyre gonna be robotaxis later this year and says autopilot is safer than a human driver and calls it "autopilot"?
- goshx 6y ago
- ffggvv 6y agoI blame the NHTSA for even letting tesla sell this autokill software. And maybe elon should be slapped with a manslaughter charge for claiming robotaxis are coming this year and that autopilot is safer than human drivers and calling it "autopilot" and "full self driving"
- skynet-9000 6y agoSome details in the article: 1) The police stated "no one was in the driver seat at the time of impact" of the Model S 2) Two people died in the subsequent fire from the crash into a tree 3) "it took firefighters nearly four hours and more than 32,000 gallons of water to extinguish the fire." 4) "At one point, crews had to call Tesla to ask how to put the fire out, Herman said." 5) "The owner, he said, backed out of the driveway, and then may have hopped in the back seat only to crash a few hundred yards down the road. He said the owner was found in the back seat upright." Another link with some additional details: https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/tesla-spring-crash-fire/285-c28a4993-5b5f-43f4-a924-e39638390647 https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/tesla-spring-crash-f...
- nexuist 6y agoIs there a particular reason why they had to fight the fire instead of waiting for it to put itself out? IIRC this is what Tesla itself recommends if there is no danger of spreading to nearby objects.
- leesec 6y agoI'm not a car safety specialist or anything but I think someone should have been driving.
- 627467 6y agoHey, it's all fine that someone keep running experiments to find solutions that lead to less deaths on the roads. Just keep those experiments far away from me as possible. Thanks.
- guru4consulting 6y agowhy is Tesla allowing auto-pilot driving when no one is sitting in the driver seat? people will always try stupid things, but seems like Tesla is at fault for allowing it.
- jonnycomputer 6y agoThere are a bunch of more pertinent things to say, but I was struck by just how thoroughly demolished that car looked, and by the fact that it took 32k gallons of water to put the fire out because the battery kept re-igniting. I'm no expert on what typical high-speed crashes look like, but this seems ... problematic.
- throwaway2037 6y agoThese are good points. I am not qualified in this area, but it would be interesting to hear if 32k gallons of water is a lot to extinguish a total wreck fire. Is water the best thing to use for these battery fires? (Hint: Is a foam product more suitable, but more expensive?) Also: Do the batteries in hybrid cars have similar issues?
- travisporter 6y agoTwo big questions for me are : - Will this change their decision to remove radar? - How did driver move to passenger seat (or idk exit the vehicle!) with autopilot still going? That should be impossible. car should have weight sensors for seatbelt in passenger side, maybe need one on driver side too!
- Tiktaalik 6y agoGovernment needs to step in and turn off these 'features'
- cybert00th 6y agoOn the face of it, it appears we're putting waaaay too much trust in technologies that aren't anywhere near the levels of autonomy we expect them to have. Whether that's an issue of the relevant car companies not communicating with their customers properly; or their customers being ignorant - or worse still, wilfully negligent, is probably something for the courts to decide. Either way, it seems to me an extended period of reflection over what we as human beings are currently doing to one another with these new-fangled driving technologies, is needed.
- mlindner 6y agoI'm not sure why people are believing the cops here. This is physically impossible. If you're not in the seat or have the seat belt unbuckled it slows to a stop and disengages autopilot.
- hi41 6y ago>>The owner, he said, backed out of the driveway, and then may have hopped in the back seat only to crash a few hundred yards down the road. How did the car not stop recognizing no one was at the driver seat who could put hands on the steering wheel in case of an emergency?
- websites2323 6y agoFrom Elon Musk on Twitter: * Data logs recovered so far show Autopilot was not enabled & this car did not purchase FSD. * Moreover, standard Autopilot would require lane lines to turn on, which this street did not have.
- mimixco 6y agoI live in this area and I definitely think the terrain here was a contributing factor. It would not take 15 seconds of hands off the wheel to have an accident. It would take 2-3 seconds. The Woodlands is not your typical residential area. It was carved out of two old lumber mills with the intent of keeping as many trees as possible, hence lots of curves, small roads, and trees alongside them. At the time it was built (by an oil wildcatter who was worried about urbanization's impact on his family), The Woodlands was the largest master planned community in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woodlands%2C_Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woodlands%2C_Texas Also, a recent video made after the crash shows Autopilot can be activated without lane markings: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26870417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26870417 Finally, local police here reported that the couple's spouses said the two men, aged 58 and 68, were talking about the Autopilot before they left on the drive and were excited about trying the features...