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NTSB: Tesla Model S in Crash Couldn't Have Been Using Autopilot
- King-Aaron 5y agoJust a classic case of someone driving their extremely fast car just that bit too fast. Sad to hear.
- itsoktocry 5y agoAnd burning alive because they couldn't escape the car. No big deal.
- King-Aaron 5y agoThis isn't uncommon in motor vehicle accidents, however.
- jonathankoren 5y agoIn Hollywood crashes maybe, but in the real world auto fires are not common at all. As of 2018, there are 56 fires per billion miles driven. Furthermore, only 3% of all fatal automobile accidents involved fire. https://www.nfpa.org/-/media/Files/News-and-Research/Fire-statistics-and-reports/US-Fire-Problem/osvehiclefires.pdf https://www.nfpa.org/-/media/Files/News-and-Research/Fire-st...
- Diederich 5y agoDo Teslas/electric cars burn more frequently in severe crashes than ICE vehicles? Last time I looked, a few years back, the data showed that ICE vehicles burned quite a bit more frequently.
- ffggvv 5y agotesla’s are death traps. you can’t put out their fires with water. and since their doors aren’t mechanical you’re stuck inside once the battery dies. this fire took over 4 hours to put out with the fire department not knowing how to put it out
- adventured 5y ago> and since their doors aren’t mechanical you’re stuck inside once the battery dies Tesla's front doors have internal mechanical levers that can be used in the case of power loss.
- King-Aaron 5y agoThis sounds like you just have a bone to pick with Tesla. Their doors can be opened when the battery dies.
- hash9 5y agoDoors that dont open on a power failure sound super fucking unsafe. Looks like on the Model s they do open manually in front if you pull the handle back enough and in the back via a hidden release cable under the seat which sounds less than ideal. I'm not sure if this is the case with the other models. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01lXcD_Uz74 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01lXcD_Uz74 https://www.manualslib.com/manual/1234782/Tesla-S.html?page=9#manual https://www.manualslib.com/manual/1234782/Tesla-S.html?page=...
- fiddlerwoaroof 5y agoThe Model 3 has a manual emergency release in the armrest: it's one of the more awkward parts of the car, actually, because it's right where most people expect the door handle to be and the actual "door handle" is a button a little bit up.
- Karunamon 5y agosince their doors aren’t mechanical you’re stuck inside once the battery dies This is maliciously false. There's a manual door handle just like you'd find in every other car; to the point where people new to them almost always use it by accident instead of using the button. https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-y-vs-model-3-differences/tesla-model-y-emergency-door-release/ https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-y-vs-model-3-differenc... It's in an identical place on the other models. Please don't trot out hot takes like this on something you don't understand.
- jsight 5y agoThat is a really good question, tbh. I've seen comparisons that show the Tesla's burning less often, but those weren't specifically post crash. A lot of ICE cars come from fuel leaks, often after major repairs and without a collision. I'm not aware of a direct comparison of post-crash fires. Anecodally, it seems the post-crash fires are rare with the 3 and Y and much less rare with the S/X.
- lazyasciiart 5y agoThe average age of a car in a fire is over ten years. Electric vehicles should be less common based on their relative youth.
- King-Aaron 5y agoThe first sentence in your article that you linked states that in one year in the US alone, 560 civilians burned to death in fires. Wrangling statistics to try and suit your argument is one thing, but that's more than one person a day that's burning to death in a car.
- jonathankoren 5y agoWrangling statistics!?!? 102 people die A DAY in automobile accidents, and you’re claiming that less than the number of people that die in a single week is common? I’ll do the math for you. Fire is involved in ONE PERCENT of all vehicle accident deaths. And then you use the word “civilian”? What do you even mean by that? How is that word even applicable here? This would be cute, if it wasn’t so obviously motivated. Go clutch your pearls somewhere else. Elon isn’t taking you on his B-Ark. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
- King-Aaron 5y ago> An estimated 212,500 vehicle fires caused 560 civilian deaths It's what it says in the article you linked. I'm not sure why they specified 'civilian deaths'. I never said it was common, I said burning to death in a car isn't uncommon. I'm no EV proponent, by the way. You seem to be pretty fired up about it though - pardon the pun. Edit: Added that I'm also not sure why civilian deaths is specifically mentioned.
- lazyasciiart 5y agoThere is a footnote from the phrase "civilian deaths" saying it is excluding firefighters.
- King-Aaron 5y agoAh yep, that would make sense then
- 5y ago
- Dylan16807 5y ago3% isn't that small. What's the percent for teslas? I'd say the stupid doors are a much bigger problem than the ability to catch fire.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoThe fleet of EVs is very different from the fleet of light duty ICE vehicle. You can't do a 1:1 comparison and have anything useful come out of it. There is no EV equivalent of a rusted out 1995 S10 with a gas tank held in with a ratchet strap for anyone to crash because EVs haven't been around that long. I suspect once you control for vehicle age the difference is marginal. Statistically nobody is burning to death in late model luxury sedans (Tesla included) because they're well enough designed that practically nobody is getting trapped in the vehicle in the first place.
- new_realist 5y agoToo early to say, I think.
- King-Aaron 5y agoPossibly, though if the original articles were reporting that 'no one was in the drivers seat', then there must have been a fairly substantial impact to throw the driver into the rear of the car. Plus, it was a 100D on a back road, I can't imagine they'd be doing a leisurely pace... Conjecture, of course.
- igetspam 5y agoBack road? Says they made it 550 feet from his home in a culdesac before leaving the road. What's the quarter mile trap speed of a 100D and what are the power numbers? How fast could it really have been going, under its own power, before gravity took over?
- vesrah 5y ago125mph-ish is what they trap in a quarter mile, 1/8th mile (660ft) trap is in the 95-100mph area.
- igetspam 5y agoElectric instant on torque can be a dangerous thing. So assuming just under the 1/8 mile number, we're probably around what? 80-85 mph before leaving the road? That'll do it. I assume it's a TX culdesac, similar to mine and not dense pack like my old one in CA. Plenty of ace and temptation to do something I'll advised.
- taneq 5y ago200km/h in 10.5 seconds, apparently.
- macksd 5y agoDidn't one of the early statements from the investigation say that they knew that no one was in the driver's seat at the time of the accident? I don't know on what basis they would make that statement and of course it could be erroneous, but all the more reason to remember we all know so little we probably can't reason about it well enough for conjecture to be much better than random guessing. edit: Indeed [https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/19/business/tesla-fatal-crash-no-one-in-drivers-seat/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/19/business/tesla-fatal-crash-no...]
- ffggvv 5y agoit was going 30 lol. i’m sure they just got in the back seat for no reason too
- websites420 5y agoLooking forward to the retractions from all those publications that strongly implied or outright claimed AP was involved.
- itsoktocry 5y agoIt was "strongly implied" because no one was in the driver's seat. Now there is evidence there was a driver, after an investigation. Why should they retract anything?
- prophesi 5y agoThe actual reason they don't need to retract anything is that the sensational articles already paid off, and they're now off to write another unsubstantiated claim of a headline on something else.
- NikolaeVarius 5y agoBecause lying tends to reduce trust.
- SllX 5y agoWould be good form after a reactionary piece prior to the results of the NTSB investigation to see the publications that published such pieces take some responsibility for what they publish. Better form would have been not publishing reactionary articles in the first place.
- adolph 5y agoSo you are saying in the absence of evidence they claimed that there was no driver and they have no reason to correct that misinformation?
- Jordrok 5y agoYou do realize that it was the police who originally stated that there was no driver?
- new_realist 5y agoI suspect they tried to activate AutoSteer, didn’t realize they failed, and let TACC (which did activate) drove them straight into some trees. So much for automatic emergency braking.
- toast0 5y agoAutomatic emergency braking systems don't generally brake for stationary objects once the vehicle is going beyond parking speeds. They're really designed to reduce colission forces between vehicles in motion (or recently in motion), and some more recent systems try to reduce forces between vehicles and pedestrians. A Tesla is happy to slam into a parked emergency vehicle at full speed, as has been demonstrated several times; it's not surprising they don't stop for trees either.
- LeoPanthera 5y agoThis is not true for Teslas, and I've tested it (in a safe environment) in my own. It uses vision, as well as radar, to detect obstacles, and will brake from highway speeds to zero when there is a car stopped ahead.
- xeromal 5y agoI don't think it's guaranteed though. I've noticed the same as you, but I've also had it lock the brakes after seeing a shadow (lol) and I've had it speed up to 70 mph on Topanga Canyon Blvd (speed limit 45 mph) and nearly run into a parked semi.
- taneq 5y agoThis varies based on exact hardware revision, software revision including OTA updates, and active settings at the time. I don’t think anyone but Tesla can make any definitive statement about the behaviour of any given car at any given point in time.
- Dah00n 5y agoThat's insane! That alone should make it illegal on the road.
- majormunky 5y agoIt feels a bit odd for them to say, autopilot could not have been used in that area. "In a reconstruction using a similar Tesla, the agency found that Autosteer was not usable on that part of the road, meaning the Autopilot system couldn't have worked." Whose to say that Tesla didn't update something between the crash and when the NTSB tested autopilot in that area? I don't think they did do that, but are there any safeguards in place to detect that happening? Its one thing to say that a car cannot do something because of a physical issue on the car, vs some software that can be updated or have bugs that haven't been caught yet.
- babesh 5y agoThey used the same version of software.
- _underfl0w_ 5y agoLocal software != map data, necessarily.
- nickik 5y agoTesla has version of map data, if they did their job they used the same version for both. Also, I don't think this feature actually uses map data.
- igetspam 5y agoMy wife's truck has a lane guidance system. It will gladly keep you in a well marked lane. When there are no lines or bad lines it makes a loud ding and shows a big orange cancelation message on the dash display. This is a current year F150. I can only imagine Tesla has at least as good a system as Ford. As for updates, the infotainment system has a record of the last check-in and the last update, as well as the current systems version, similar to your phone or computer. With the number of Tesla hackers out there, it seems nearly impossible for the conspiracy you're suggesting to be a reality.
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- ffggvv 5y agonothing to see here. they were just going 30 and hit a tree randomly and then got in the back seat and burned to death over 4 hours with a fire that was impossible to put out and the doors non operational oh and i’m sure all these brake failures in china have nothing to do with it https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/23/tesla-in-china-pressure-mounts-on-carmaker-after-customer-protest.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/23/tesla-in-china-pressure-moun...
- jeremiahhs 5y agoFalse story by the media. The actual fire department said it took minutes to put out the main fire. https://www.caranddriver.com/news/amp36189237/tesla-model-s-fire-texas-crash-details-fire-chief/ https://www.caranddriver.com/news/amp36189237/tesla-model-s-...
- jsight 5y agoI see no confirmation of a 30 mph speed and it seems unlikely.
- harshaw 5y agoanother anecdote: an acquaintance let a friend borrow their Tesla X plaid (or similar, I think this was before plaid). Upon leaving their subdivision the "friend" immediately totaled the X by launching it into a drainage ditch in Florida. I've never driven a Tesla X or any car with this much power. I am surprised by how someone can get into so much trouble in 550 feet - but clearly people are surprised and don't let up on the accelerator.
- xeromal 5y agoIt's probably a whisky throttle situation. The immediate panic causes you to floor it more thinking it's the brake.
- jcims 5y agoI just rented a similar Model X (P100D) last week. They are remarkably fast for the size of the vehicle, but I found the accelerator pedal to be the closest thing to an ideal throttle control that I've experienced. It's extremely gentle and forgiving in slow/close situations (e.g. parallel parking), has instantaneous response and backing off of it brings an aggressive regen braking effect that is very featherable (?) and useful. I would guess they just panicked in a strange an extremely expensive car and weren't able to lift their foot off the pedal once doom was imminent. It happened to me when I was a kid, I ran over a fence while turning my dad's girlfriends car around in a tight parking lot. I accidentally goosed the throttle while backing up, panicked, then stomped it to the floor while backing over that poor fence. Very strange experience, almost like my leg was being shocked and I couldn't control it.
- chasd00 5y agoYep, I’ve been there too. Mom’s new Camaro, ironically I hit my neighbor about 10 miles from our neighborhood. No one was hurt but I have never dreaded a phone call to mom more heh.
- m463 5y agoIt could also be the carpets. The carpets suck. They have good velcro to stick to the floor, but there's a terrible glue that keeps the carpet attached to the velcro and it softens and unsticks in the heat. If you have those carpets, I would recommend sewing the velcro patch to the carpet so it doesn't come loose.
- paxys 5y agoIt's weird that the NTSB drove another Tesla car on the same road and concluded that because autopilot wasn't available for their car it couldn't have been on in the crash. Aren't vehicle logs a thing? What if there was a bug which mistakenly turned it on in the original car? What if there was a software update sometime between the crash and the investigation which changed the behavior? The article even says that the investigators recovered the damaged "black box", but a month later we have no details about it? Edit: changed year to month /facepalm
- xeromal 5y agoTeslas log a tremendous amount of data, but my guess is that it was melted in the fire and unable to upload before it was destroyed. There is a black box with some logs and I believe 8 photos that are taken when the airbags deploy but perhaps the fire destroyed that too.
- dharmab 5y ago> The car’s restraint control module, which can record data associated with vehicle speed, belt status, acceleration, and airbag deployment, was recovered but sustained fire damage. The restraint control module was taken to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recorder laboratory for evaluation.
- mrpippy 5y agoThe vehicle’s main storage was destroyed in the fire.
- barney54 5y agoI believe that the NTSB found that the logs were destroyed in the crash and subsequent fire.
- ajross 5y agoThe report is linked in the article. They report that the storage for the media control unit (where the video goes) was destroyed. The restraint control module (more limited data capture including speed/acceleration and airbag status) "was recovered but sustained fire damage" and has been taken to a lab for evaluation. They might get something off of it.
- tallanvor 5y agoNo matter the cause of this accident or previous ones, Tesla's response highlights why I'll never buy one of their cars. When an accident occurs, the response by Tesla should be nothing more than "we will provide any and all data we have concerning this incident to the appropriate authorities when we receive a valid request for that information." Musk tweeting about whether or not the driver purchased certain features is insane. He shouldn't have access to that data, let alone be allowed to publicize the information.
- ben_w 5y agoI’m not so sure. I recognise the risk — these days I assume that entirely innocuous facts about me today can become socially unacceptable in the future, having witnessed this happen to multiple people in my life already. I also recognise that if Tesla doesn’t get out in front of every single incident, it may set back the replacement of human drivers with safer AI drivers. I also also recognise that Musk is wildly overpromising on the self driving tech, and really only trust him as a rocket scientist and salesman (be the thing he’s selling cars or visions of the future), not digital privacy. I don’t really trust any famous person for privacy, because they necessarily don’t have even close to as much of it as a normal person.
- chrischen 5y agoThere's a very real risk that half-assed "AI" driving just leads to worse human drivers that stop paying enough attention to driving normally. Sensors are definitely better than humans at reacting to collisions though.
- bellyfullofbac 5y agoHah, I thought you meant worse drivers outside of the Tesla. I guess if I wanted to be an ass, I can cut off most Teslas because they have the auto-brake feature. (Well most modern cars have it).
- brianwawok 5y ago
- lbriner 5y agoThe thing I continue to find interesting is the fear involved with an "autopilot" crash (even if this was not one). Every day around the world, hundreds (1000s?) of people are killed in standard car accidents, whereas, as a proportion of the market, driverlss cars cause a tiny number of crashes, yet people panic, regulators bear their teeth and protesters speak up as soon as single accident was caused by (or assumed to be caused by) a driverless car. I guess it is an illusion of control in normal cars, despite the fact that electronics should be better in almost every regard for safer driving.
- yreg 5y agoThere is a group of people who are into cars and who agree that autopilot is generally safer. They consider themselves being exceptional drivers (and to be fair they often are pretty good drivers) and therefore they think that in their particular case it's safer to not use it. Of course determining so on individual feelings is dubious (and perhaps there is or soon will be no person outperforming the AP).
- nerfhammer 5y agoIt's a matter of trust. Do you trust a robot to make decisions of life or death? You can't empathize with the robot, you know it can't empathize with you, and you instinctively don't feel like you can understand or predict the actions of agents that you don't empathize with and don't think empathizes with you. Humans make mistakes but they're understandable or comprehendible mistakes; with a robot you don't know types of mistakes to expect. You don't have a theory of mind for a robot.
- chmod775 5y ago> despite the fact that electronics should be better in almost every regard for safer driving. Maybe in the future. For now electronics are still handicapped by AI that is not anywhere even remotely close to humans. "AIs" ability to reason about traffic situations and, by extension, planning are laughable and even if that properly worked it would still be handicapped by image recognition I wouldn't trust to tell a trashcan from a car. At this point it's pretty obvious that until better AI comes along we're stuck with terrible. Certainly just pouring ever more resources into "current gen" NNs won't get us anywhere.
- francisduvivier 5y agoWow this investigation is garbage. - The gross generalization saying that it couldn't have been enabled because they failed to enable it I their specific situation. - The gross extrapolation of saying that the driver must have been in the seat when it happened because the driver was in the seat when the car started. I mean, how useless is that of an investigation. Where is the log analysis, witness reports, and camera images of points closer to the crash site. I feel very disappointed in the NTSB.
- amckenna 5y agoI really don't understand how they can make this statement: > The report states that when the car started, security video shows the owner in the driver's seat, contradicting reports at the time of the April 17 accident that the seat was empty when the car crashed. Those two things aren't contradictory at all. The car's journey could have started with the driver in the driver's seat, but been empty when the crash occurred. A lot can happen in the time between the start and the end.