8 ms·

No one was in driver’s seat in fatal Tesla crash

37 points by RyanShook 5y ago

barefeg 5y ago
I thought it also used pressure sensors on the driver seat besides the 30 sec nudge on the steering wheel?
- gher-shyu3i 5y ago
  Exactly. Plus, luxury car manufacturers today have a camera in the dashboard to sense the driver's drowsiness level, and tells him to pull over if it senses that he's tired or dosing off.
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    I appreciate the help, but definitely wouldn't buy a car that puts me on camera, no exceptions. Companies have proven themselves irresponsible with such technology.
    - chaorace 5y ago
      I think they may be referring to a camera facing the road, not the driver. That's how Toyota's drowsiness sensing functionality works. It tracks the lane lines using a dashboard camera and detects swaying/lane drifting. The system will nudge you back into your lane and beep at you. If it has to do this repeatedly, the dashboard will light up and ask you to take a break.
      - brianwawok 5y ago
        3/y both have a driver facing camera above the rearview mirror. As of yet, it is not officially enabled for anything.
        pests 5y ago
        That's incorrect there's an opt-in for them to send the in-cabin footage during "emergency situations" or some other ill defined term. edit: "Model 3 and Model Y are equipped with a Cabin Camera that is located above the rear-view mirror and turned off by default. If you enable the Cabin Camera, a short video clip will be captured and shared with Tesla following a safety event such as a collision or an advanced emergency braking (AEB) event. This short video clip is intended to capture the few seconds before a safety event and does not include any footage from the safety event itself." https://www.tesla.com/support/car-safety-security-features#cabin-camera https://www.tesla.com/support/car-safety-security-features#c...
        brianwawok 5y ago
        Correct and that doesn’t do anything. Other cars with the camera enable such things as hands free driving. Tesla camera doesn’t do anything for you. Maybe send a pic of you screaming if you crash, but it’s not useful to you at that point.
    - MertsA 5y ago
      Take matters into your own hands then. OpenPilot supports this and their firmware is open source, you can flash it yourself if you want. You can also disable uploading driving data to the internet and the driver monitoring camera defaults to not providing them any data. https://comma.ai/ https://comma.ai/
      - mixmastamyk 5y ago
        Sounds cool, but I don't drive enough to get sleepy doing it.
- ericmay 5y ago
  It does. I think if you turn on the cruise control (maintain speed but not lane) the car will not break or keep the lane. Maybe the driver thought they activated Autopilot but in reality activated cruise control at a high rate of speed and jumped in back? There wouldn't be an Autopilot nudge for cruise control either (IIRC).
ineedasername 5y ago
I don't think any reasonable person could think "autopilot" meant this was okay to do. It seems more like thrill seeking, maybe? Yes, I think Tesla dangerously over-sells the autopilot capabilities, but I have a hard time laying the blame for this accident at those feet. If anything, it's unfortunate that such a ridiculous thing happened, because Tesla will be able to use it to paint all autopilot failures with the same brush of irrational behavior, when many are a rational response to the the over-sold marketing from Tesla.
- melling 5y ago
  “But they are so close to FSD.” What are people going to think? People will take what they think is a small risk. “Major improvements are being made to the vision stack every week. Beta button hopefully next month. This is a “march of 9’s” trying to get probability of no injury above 99.999999% of miles for city driving. Production Autopilot is already above that for highway driving. 6:17 PM · Apr 14, 2021” UPDATE To be clear, I obviously understand they are not close to FSD. I’m trying to get people to understand how many in the general public will view this.
  - bsamuels 5y ago
    Tesla's FSD is a complete fraud. Musk has been saying it's less than a year away since 2018 https://youtu.be/antLneVlxcs?t=639 https://youtu.be/antLneVlxcs?t=639 https://youtu.be/antLneVlxcs?t=725 https://youtu.be/antLneVlxcs?t=725 https://youtu.be/antLneVlxcs?t=489 https://youtu.be/antLneVlxcs?t=489 https://youtu.be/antLneVlxcs?t=582 https://youtu.be/antLneVlxcs?t=582
    - jcranmer 5y ago
      > since 2018 At least 2016, actually.
  - bob33212 5y ago
    Lets say that somehow the only thing these people knew about a Tesla was that tweet and they bought a Tesla based off of that Tweet and someone else enabled autosteer (beta), which is off by default on a new Tesla. And some how they buckled in the driver's seatbelt and put a weight on the seat accidently, not because they were trying to circumvent Tesla safety features. They would still be in a situation where they knew that there was a chance that the could be injured by relying only on autopilot. No one should expect autopilot to be perfect and if they value their safety they should pay attention at all times just like the Tesla UI tells you when you enable autopilot and while you are driving.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mam3 5y ago
I mean at some point if you dont care about your own life..
- eric__cartman 5y ago
  You have to straight up be suicidal to attempt something like this
davewritescode 5y ago
This is a great example of technology that refuses to embrace how human brains actually work. The lawyers say that drivers must be engaged and ready to take over while the technology does a good enough job that it makes driving as un-engaging as possible. This is not how human brains work. It doesn't help that the CEO is lying to investors and customers that "full self-driving" is right around the corner and Tesla's are on the cusp of providing robot Taxi services.
- coldtea 5y ago
  >The lawyers say that drivers must be engaged and ready to take over while the technology does a good enough job that it makes driving as un-engaging as possible. This is not how human brains work. Yes. "Drivers must be engaged and ready to take over" is not really a thing humans will ever do (if they have a tech that can sorta drive itself, they will 100% get distracted) And even worse, the name of the feature and the whole marketing makes it appear as its Level 5, where it's not even a solid 4.
  - jfim 5y ago
    > if they have a tech that can sorta drive itself, they will 100% get distracted That's been known for a while. Some of the automation systems that have a human in the loop will actually lower the level of automation every once in a while and ask the human to take over so that the human does not get complacent. That's not really a popular way to sell cars though. Having a car that requests a lane change or to re-center the car in the lane every once in a while isn't what people are really looking for, even though it would increase driver attentiveness.
  - buran77 5y ago
    Worse yet, the AP beta many customers are testing now is explicitly billed as "full self-driving". Which it isn't. For people who assume the AP is some breakthrough in self driving tech, it doesn't feel too different from this [0] 2013 Mercedes Benz video and demo. Just that different CEOs have different appetites for lying to customers. [0] https://twitter.com/sascha_p/status/1321469775051186177 https://twitter.com/sascha_p/status/1321469775051186177
the-dude 5y ago
Discussed before : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26852399 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26852399 ( 695 comments )
dragontamer 5y ago
There are two possible explanations I've seen proposed: 1. The obvious. The "driver" turned on autopilot and then hopped into the back seat for a thrill-ride. This is what everyone is talking about, but its not necessarily true. 2. The less obvious. The driver took his passenger for a joyride, lost control of the vehicle in a residential area and then slammed into a tree. Lets call this the "Tiger Woords" theory. The resulting fire damaged the doors and the two people were unable to escape. The driver unbuckles himself and tries to escape through the rear-doors, but those also don't work. As such, both people burn to death in the car. -------- This isn't *necessarily* an autopilot problem. But this is absolutely a "you crashed and then burned to death" problem. In both #1 and #2, this crash proves that a high-speed collision involving these Li-Ion battery packs could very well result in a fire that's extremely hard to douse. There's also been numerous complaints about the difficulty of opening Tesla-doors when power is cut. If the batteries are damaged (or on fire), can be be sure that those doors can be opened at all? How do Tesla's doors perform under a variety of crash situations? Are the manual-override instructions too confusing for typical people (especially during emergencies) ?? See: https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/1rdqte/question_manual_overrides/ https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/1rdqte/questio... Even Tesla fans have difficulty precisely describing the manual override procedure to open up these doors.
- yakz 5y ago
  At least on my Model 3, the manual override is a literal handle that is easy enough to use that I have had unfamiliar passengers open the door with it accidentally more than once.
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/opening-the-doors-in-the-model-s-if-power-fails.9452/ https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/opening-the-doors-in... > The interior handles on the front doors electronically open the door; if you continue pulling them all the way, a cable engages and unlocks the door in case of power loss > The rear door latch is in the body frame and not the door. Therefore, in the event of power loss, there's something to pull on under the seat which will open the door That's from 2012, so things have probably changed for the S. The front door looks easy enough, but if the front door was damaged from the accident... the rear-manual open procedure looks complicated.
anon776 5y ago
Would not surprise me if alcohol was involved.
aaroninsf 5y ago
There should be a name akin to "uncanny valley" to describe the deadly terrain between what we have, in everything from "driver assist" and "adaptive cruise control" and contemporary "autopilot", and the currently vacuous promise of reliable resilient autonomous vehicles. Might I suggest "Death Valley."

37 points by RyanShook 5y ago

barefeg 5y ago

I thought it also used pressure sensors on the driver seat besides the 30 sec nudge on the steering wheel?

gher-shyu3i 5y ago
Exactly. Plus, luxury car manufacturers today have a camera in the dashboard to sense the driver's drowsiness level, and tells him to pull over if it senses that he's tired or dosing off.
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  I appreciate the help, but definitely wouldn't buy a car that puts me on camera, no exceptions. Companies have proven themselves irresponsible with such technology.
  - chaorace 5y ago
    I think they may be referring to a camera facing the road, not the driver. That's how Toyota's drowsiness sensing functionality works. It tracks the lane lines using a dashboard camera and detects swaying/lane drifting. The system will nudge you back into your lane and beep at you. If it has to do this repeatedly, the dashboard will light up and ask you to take a break.
    - brianwawok 5y ago
      3/y both have a driver facing camera above the rearview mirror. As of yet, it is not officially enabled for anything.
      - pests 5y ago
        That's incorrect there's an opt-in for them to send the in-cabin footage during "emergency situations" or some other ill defined term. edit: "Model 3 and Model Y are equipped with a Cabin Camera that is located above the rear-view mirror and turned off by default. If you enable the Cabin Camera, a short video clip will be captured and shared with Tesla following a safety event such as a collision or an advanced emergency braking (AEB) event. This short video clip is intended to capture the few seconds before a safety event and does not include any footage from the safety event itself." https://www.tesla.com/support/car-safety-security-features#cabin-camera https://www.tesla.com/support/car-safety-security-features#c...
        brianwawok 5y ago
        Correct and that doesn’t do anything. Other cars with the camera enable such things as hands free driving. Tesla camera doesn’t do anything for you. Maybe send a pic of you screaming if you crash, but it’s not useful to you at that point.
  - MertsA 5y ago
    Take matters into your own hands then. OpenPilot supports this and their firmware is open source, you can flash it yourself if you want. You can also disable uploading driving data to the internet and the driver monitoring camera defaults to not providing them any data. https://comma.ai/ https://comma.ai/
    - mixmastamyk 5y ago
      Sounds cool, but I don't drive enough to get sleepy doing it.
ericmay 5y ago
It does. I think if you turn on the cruise control (maintain speed but not lane) the car will not break or keep the lane. Maybe the driver thought they activated Autopilot but in reality activated cruise control at a high rate of speed and jumped in back? There wouldn't be an Autopilot nudge for cruise control either (IIRC).

ineedasername 5y ago

I don't think any reasonable person could think "autopilot" meant this was okay to do. It seems more like thrill seeking, maybe? Yes, I think Tesla dangerously over-sells the autopilot capabilities, but I have a hard time laying the blame for this accident at those feet. If anything, it's unfortunate that such a ridiculous thing happened, because Tesla will be able to use it to paint all autopilot failures with the same brush of irrational behavior, when many are a rational response to the the over-sold marketing from Tesla.

melling 5y ago
“But they are so close to FSD.” What are people going to think? People will take what they think is a small risk. “Major improvements are being made to the vision stack every week. Beta button hopefully next month. This is a “march of 9’s” trying to get probability of no injury above 99.999999% of miles for city driving. Production Autopilot is already above that for highway driving. 6:17 PM · Apr 14, 2021” UPDATE To be clear, I obviously understand they are not close to FSD. I’m trying to get people to understand how many in the general public will view this.
- bsamuels 5y ago
  Tesla's FSD is a complete fraud. Musk has been saying it's less than a year away since 2018 https://youtu.be/antLneVlxcs?t=639 https://youtu.be/antLneVlxcs?t=639 https://youtu.be/antLneVlxcs?t=725 https://youtu.be/antLneVlxcs?t=725 https://youtu.be/antLneVlxcs?t=489 https://youtu.be/antLneVlxcs?t=489 https://youtu.be/antLneVlxcs?t=582 https://youtu.be/antLneVlxcs?t=582
  - jcranmer 5y ago
    > since 2018 At least 2016, actually.
- bob33212 5y ago
  Lets say that somehow the only thing these people knew about a Tesla was that tweet and they bought a Tesla based off of that Tweet and someone else enabled autosteer (beta), which is off by default on a new Tesla. And some how they buckled in the driver's seatbelt and put a weight on the seat accidently, not because they were trying to circumvent Tesla safety features. They would still be in a situation where they knew that there was a chance that the could be injured by relying only on autopilot. No one should expect autopilot to be perfect and if they value their safety they should pay attention at all times just like the Tesla UI tells you when you enable autopilot and while you are driving.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mam3 5y ago

I mean at some point if you dont care about your own life..

eric__cartman 5y ago
You have to straight up be suicidal to attempt something like this

davewritescode 5y ago

This is a great example of technology that refuses to embrace how human brains actually work. The lawyers say that drivers must be engaged and ready to take over while the technology does a good enough job that it makes driving as un-engaging as possible. This is not how human brains work. It doesn't help that the CEO is lying to investors and customers that "full self-driving" is right around the corner and Tesla's are on the cusp of providing robot Taxi services.

coldtea 5y ago
>The lawyers say that drivers must be engaged and ready to take over while the technology does a good enough job that it makes driving as un-engaging as possible. This is not how human brains work. Yes. "Drivers must be engaged and ready to take over" is not really a thing humans will ever do (if they have a tech that can sorta drive itself, they will 100% get distracted) And even worse, the name of the feature and the whole marketing makes it appear as its Level 5, where it's not even a solid 4.
- jfim 5y ago
  > if they have a tech that can sorta drive itself, they will 100% get distracted That's been known for a while. Some of the automation systems that have a human in the loop will actually lower the level of automation every once in a while and ask the human to take over so that the human does not get complacent. That's not really a popular way to sell cars though. Having a car that requests a lane change or to re-center the car in the lane every once in a while isn't what people are really looking for, even though it would increase driver attentiveness.
- buran77 5y ago
  Worse yet, the AP beta many customers are testing now is explicitly billed as "full self-driving". Which it isn't. For people who assume the AP is some breakthrough in self driving tech, it doesn't feel too different from this [0] 2013 Mercedes Benz video and demo. Just that different CEOs have different appetites for lying to customers. [0] https://twitter.com/sascha_p/status/1321469775051186177 https://twitter.com/sascha_p/status/1321469775051186177

the-dude 5y ago

Discussed before : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26852399 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26852399 ( 695 comments )

dragontamer 5y ago

There are two possible explanations I've seen proposed: 1. The obvious. The "driver" turned on autopilot and then hopped into the back seat for a thrill-ride. This is what everyone is talking about, but its not necessarily true. 2. The less obvious. The driver took his passenger for a joyride, lost control of the vehicle in a residential area and then slammed into a tree. Lets call this the "Tiger Woords" theory. The resulting fire damaged the doors and the two people were unable to escape. The driver unbuckles himself and tries to escape through the rear-doors, but those also don't work. As such, both people burn to death in the car. -------- This isn't *necessarily* an autopilot problem. But this is absolutely a "you crashed and then burned to death" problem. In both #1 and #2, this crash proves that a high-speed collision involving these Li-Ion battery packs could very well result in a fire that's extremely hard to douse. There's also been numerous complaints about the difficulty of opening Tesla-doors when power is cut. If the batteries are damaged (or on fire), can be be sure that those doors can be opened at all? How do Tesla's doors perform under a variety of crash situations? Are the manual-override instructions too confusing for typical people (especially during emergencies) ?? See: https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/1rdqte/question_manual_overrides/ https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/1rdqte/questio... Even Tesla fans have difficulty precisely describing the manual override procedure to open up these doors.

yakz 5y ago
At least on my Model 3, the manual override is a literal handle that is easy enough to use that I have had unfamiliar passengers open the door with it accidentally more than once.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/opening-the-doors-in-the-model-s-if-power-fails.9452/ https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/opening-the-doors-in... > The interior handles on the front doors electronically open the door; if you continue pulling them all the way, a cable engages and unlocks the door in case of power loss > The rear door latch is in the body frame and not the door. Therefore, in the event of power loss, there's something to pull on under the seat which will open the door That's from 2012, so things have probably changed for the S. The front door looks easy enough, but if the front door was damaged from the accident... the rear-manual open procedure looks complicated.

anon776 5y ago

Would not surprise me if alcohol was involved.

aaroninsf 5y ago

There should be a name akin to "uncanny valley" to describe the deadly terrain between what we have, in everything from "driver assist" and "adaptive cruise control" and contemporary "autopilot", and the currently vacuous promise of reliable resilient autonomous vehicles. Might I suggest "Death Valley."