The car came to rest more than 70 metres away, on the opposite side of the road, leaving a trail of wreckage. According to witnesses, the Model S burst into flames while still airborne. Several passersby tried to open the doors and rescue the driver, but they couldn’t unlock the car. When they heard explosions and saw flames through the windows, they retreated. Even the firefighters, who arrived 20 minutes later, could do nothing but watch the Tesla burn.
At that moment, Rita Meier was unaware of the crash. She tried calling her husband, but he didn’t pick up. When he still hadn’t returned her call hours later – highly unusual for this devoted father – she attempted to track his car using Tesla’s app. It no longer worked. By the time police officers rang her doorbell late that night, Meier was already bracing for the worst.
Tesla’s garbage quality is sadly hurting the entire EV and self driving industry. Self driving cars will always have accidents. But a good self driving company will use every single accident to ensure that never happens again with their system. Humans can make the same error over and over but once self driving has been around a while, the rates of sef driving caused accidents will reduce more and more every year.
We’ll never have self-driving cars en masse, because for some reason society has accepted that humans make mistakes and sometimes people die, but they can’t do the same for robots, even if they make far fewer of them.
Several passersby tried to open the doors and rescue the driver, but they couldn’t unlock the car.
Even the firefighters, who arrived 20 minutes later, could do nothing but watch the Tesla burn.
Did no one think to break open the windows?
Yes, that must be it… they didn’t think to break a window.
Many modern cars use laminated glass on their side windows now and, as far as I’m aware, this model has doors that won’t open from the outside without power, making them very difficult to break open without tools even when the vehicle isn’t on fire. 20 minutes in to the Tesla burning, when it was already sitting on top of a bomb of a battery… you’re beyond fucked at that point. Difficult to just put the fire out for responders, a rescue was over about 15 minutes prior.
Thanks for serving a side of snark while teaching others.
I fucking hate cars, so this is a shit design feature (coming from a design engineer myself).
All the best lessons come with some sass, but on a serious note, I’d hate to think of how someone who had powerlessly watched a person burn to death would feel about seeing people second guess their actions. You would feel awful enough already.
Laminated windows are great for a lot of things (e.g. sound dampening), getting in to/out of the vehicle rapidly is definitely not one of them. The inability to unlock without power is just a chefs kiss though, obviously.
Seems like a lot of this technology is very untested and there are too many variables to make it where it should not be out on the roads.
Move fast and break things, but it’s a passenger vehicle on a public road.
It’s been a nightmare seeing tech companies move into the utility space and act like they’re the smartest people in the room and the experts that have been doing it for 100 years are morons. Move fast and break things isn’t viable when you’re operating power infrastructure either. There’s a reason why designs require the seal of a licensed engineer before they can be constructed. Applying a software development mentality to any kind of engineering is asking for fatalities
If we lived in any sort of reasonable or responsible world then these cars would be banned from public roads all over the globe.
And Tesla would be fined and sued into oblivion.
And the people who knowingly put profits before lives would be individually serve time for manslaughter.
Call me a Luddite but I won’t ride in a “self driving” car. I don’t even trust lane assist although I’ve never had a car with that feature.
I think my sweet spot is 2014 for vehicles. It’s about 50/50 with the tracking garbage and the “advanced features” on those models but anything past 2015 seems to be fully fly-by-wire and that doesn’t sit right with me.
I’m old though and honestly if I bought a 2014 right now and babied it as my non commuter car I could probably keep it until I should give up my keys. You younger people are going to have to work around all this crap.
I liked lane assist. It’s kind of like the Playstation triggers haptic feedback. It just makes the wheel slightly stiff as you near a line, but it’s very passive.
I’m sure it depends on the implementation… I turned it off on my Kia Sorento after it tried to follow the seams in the concrete instead of the lane markings, I had to fight it quite hard.
