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.
I first thought this article was about their self driving cars and I was like who tf gets in a self driving car with their baby. It’s not. It’s about Tesla cars in general. Scary stuff.
What kind of engineers work at Tesla? I feel like normal people get anxiety over deleting databases or deploying secrets to production. Accidentally taking a service down.
But there you have all kinds of terrible things happening and it’s purely because your company knows how to work policy makers. A dad dies in a fireball and what, it’s an emergency meeting? Something you look into first thing Monday morning?
Working in the aerospace industry has given me a lot of insight into the different ways engineers rationalize the potential for harm that they cause. The most common is wilful ignorance or straight up denial. No, the products I work on can never hurt anyone, it’s just xyz I know personally engineers who work on weaponry and fall heavily into that camp and it blows my mind.
The guilty don’t feel guilty, they learn not to. Easy to sleep at night when u can stuff ur pillow with 100’s.
It sounds like it tracked who drives and who was into the car to decide if they were worth crashing.
You know, to maximize the most evil to the world.
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.
It’s just that we as humans need someone we can blame for our misfortune. Which gets complicated with an artificial intelligence or even simpler algorithms behind the wheel. There’s no-one in particular you can scream at.
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.
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.
Tesla would be charged to dissolve, or forced to forfeit assets to the government.
And the people who knowingly put profits before lives would be individually serve time for manslaughter.
Not to mention obstructing criminal investigations.
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.
As a pedestrian I trust waymos more than human drivers
I have a Sprinter van with lane assist for cross country travel. As obnoxious as it is 99% of the time, it has come in clutch a few times when I started to get drowsy and drifted off my lane.
I hear you, but a 99% chance of being obnoxious isn’t a great review.
I think I’ll just stick to not driving when tired.
That’s easier said than done. You can’t judge your own behavior when impaired because you are impaired. By the time you are aware you are that tired, you’ve already been impaired for a long time.
I apparently have the uncanny ability of being able to sense when I am drowsy. Call up the X-Men
You absolutely can judge your own behavior when you are impaired, I have done that plenty of times and decided that I needed a break when driving plenty of times.
The issue is that you are a worse judge of your own behavior when impaired, so you need to take that into account
You absolutely can judge your own behavior when you are impaired
By the time you realized it you were already impaired. That’s why professional drivers have a schedule. It’s not up to them to decide for themselves that they could go longer.
For sure, but when you are driving cross-country you sometimes do not have a choice because there is nowhere to stop.
“Guess I’ll just drive off the road then!”
Unless there’s a safety concern, there’s always the side of the road. I drive 2 lane backwoods roads periodically, and it’s not uncommon to see a car pulled a bit off the road with no visible driver’s seat.
it has come in clutch a few times when I started to get drowsy and drifted off my lane.
Respect for sharing your mistakes.
it has come in clutch a few times
Massive disrespect for not learning a thing.
Yikes. Chew gum, pinch the lobe of your ear, take a nap.
Your anecdote terrifies me that people may be relying on this shit when they are overtired.
My 2023 Subaru has lane assist. It was absolutely obnoxious so I turned it off.
It turns itself back on every time you restart the van.
Driving when tired enough to drift out of your lane multiple times?
You shouldn’t have a license.
I suddenly got very tired today when driving, and noticed my car drifting out of lane as I was unfocused, I was far from home, didn’t have any snacks or anything.
Luckily I found a place to park soon after, pulled over, and rested for 20 min or so.
Tiredness can come sudden, it doesn’t mean you should loose your license as long as you can deal with it in a safe manner.
I’ve had tiredness come around everytime I try to drive West around 3:30-5:00 when the sun is around setting is the perfect time where it just hits me and the traffic slows to a crawl were the last 10 miles are just hitting myself until I get to class and then Im suddenly fully awake.
If it happens to someone multiple times and they treat lane assist as a crutch then they are not safe to drive on the road.
The best part is they followed up with this gem so I know they didn’t pull over like you did:
For sure, but when you are driving cross-country you sometimes do not have a choice because there is nowhere to stop.
Fair point.
I’ve never had any issue with the lane assist in my Mitsubishi. It’s absolutely built as an “assist” and not something that will actually try to take control from you. It’s trivial to “overpower” it manually and turn out of your lane without signaling if that’s what you want to do, but does a perfectly reasonable job of steering on its own when left to its own devices.
That said, I wouldn’t be driving a vehicle new enough to have the feature yet either if I hadn’t been rear ended a couple of years ago and had my 2012 Lancer written off. :(
I quite like lane assist in the 2019 Honda I drive, even though it gets it wrong occasionally. It will not function unless it detects that you’re providing some steering input of your own, and it’s easy to override just by steering the way you want to go. That and cruise control are handy on the highway and have worked well for 6 years with no problems. But it’s very far from either functioning or being advertised as “full self driving.”
So it does move the wheel under your hands? That’s just gross to me. I guess maybe I should rent a car with it and give it a shot but I don’t think I’ll like it.
I rented a Hyundai Elantra. Yes, the wheel will move under your hand. Yes, it has hand detection, which is probably trivial to spoof. When I used it, winter had just ended and lines on the road weren’t always clear, so it would occasionally disable itself. Trying to change lanes without signals isn’t terrible, but certainly won’t happen by accident.
I would by no means rely on this, or recommend relying on it, just like I wouldn’t recommend relying on blind spot detection, but they can be handy aids to improve your overall driving, and can help catch your mistakes.
Does it pull the wheel when you’re trying to change lanes?
I see the blind spot detection on other people’s mirrors when I pass them and that looks cool as fuck but what happens the instant it fails? If I’m reliant on it and it breaks one day am I going to mistakenly merge into another driver’s right of way?
It didn’t so much as pull as get stiffer to turn out of the lane. Again, that doesn’t happen if your signals are on, so it’s a good reminder to use your signals, too.
Like I said, relying on these assists as replacements for proper driving isn’t something I would recommend. You should still be shoulder checking and using your mirrors. My wife’s vehicle has blind spot detection, which turns on an amber light by the mirror. If you’re changing lanes, it’s an obvious indicator that it may not be safe. A more thorough shoulder check can identify if the vehicle is actually at risk for collision. For example, if you just passed a vehicle and are pulling away, the detection light may still be on, but you aren’t at risk of collision. Alternatively, if I thought the lane was clear and decide to change lanes, the light may be on due to a speeding driver who is approaching to pass me in the adjacent lane. The light will be on even though he isn’t in the way yet, and changing lanes could result in an accident. Or maybe someone has been sitting in your blind spot for a few minutes and you decide to change lanes. A quick mirror check indicates you’re safe, but that amber light says maybe not. If your shoulder check doesn’t catch the problem, you probably haven’t done it well enough.
Again, can be good assistance tools, I don’t think they’re good enough to be replacements yet.
It didn’t so much as pull as get stiffer to turn out of the lane. Again, that doesn’t happen if your signals are on
woah, that’s pretty cool actually.
The amber light in the mirror is what I’ve seen in other people’s blind spot assistance. It’s really cool but I’d hate to get used to it and depend on it the day it stops working.
I have a Toyota with lane assist and it doesn’t. The “lane assist” is part of cruise control. It’s off by default.
I love it because it removes a little of the mental load giving me more time to scan the road for potential problems.
Off by default should be the default.
OK yeah, if I have the cruise control on I can see having lane assist. Can you use the CC independently of lane assist?
When cruise control is on, yes, but it’s extremely gentle. The slightest bit of resistance from the driver will overpower it.
I should try this stuff and then see which of those cars I can disable the tracking antennas
I can’t speak for other manufacturers, or even in other countries, but Mitsubishi Canada at least has an opt-out for data collection. You need to call their customer care number and they will remotely disable it.
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.
I think Ford does a good job of offering the features and tech, but not making them required. Even their EVs have settings that can mimic a gas driving experience. Be a Luddite trust what you trust. But don’t pigeon hole your acceptable years of manufacture.
My wife had a rental for a trip she and my daughter were going on for a gymnastics event and I got to drive it back from the rental place and it had lane assist.
Every time another car passed in the opposite lane the damn thing would try and jerk in the opposite direction of that car, sometimes almost running itself off the road into the ditch in the process.
That’s horrible
Drove a few cars with “lane hold” and it’s infuriating to have to suddenly correct the car’s trajectory at every curve because it misjudges the road line. Some cars are worse than others but it was literally the first thing I disabled every time. I wonder how truck drivers feel about it. Do modern trucks even have this?
Closest I’ve come in a truck is an annoyingly loud alert for everything the computer reckoned was an issue and that was painful enough. Every time I’d drive it it’d be blaring the alarm for some reason or another and if it had been a long term company truck instead of a rental I probably would have ended up removing the speaker.
For example the lane departure warning would fire off every time you moved over to not run into someone parked on the side of the road, the close distance warning would fire off regularly when people merged in front of you, and if it was windy it’d set off an alarm to let you know the truck was being blown around when driving. Could be useful if you’re mentally challenged or blind but that sort of thing is just going to annoy anyone who isn’t. You couldn’t even turn the alarms off properly - you could go through the deliberately prolonged procedure to turn them off temporarily but then they come back again every time you start the truck.
I’ve driven an SUV with lane keep assist and it would pull at the wheel trying to follow lane markings that were outdated or ones it just made up, I hope that particular bit of ‘safety’ tech doesn’t make it to any truck I have to drive.
I don’t know what professional truckers have for “assist” but I’m sure they resist it. “I’m a professional fucking driver! I don’t want this shit.”
I’ve got a 2008 manual. It doesn’t even have cruise control. It’s perfect. I’m keeping it as long as I possibly can.
'96 and '05 pickup trucks I keep flogging along for work, '05 SUV that’s owned by my wife. They aren’t going to last forever but I’m going to try.
I’m helping by using it as little as possible.
I like electric cars well enough for their simplicity and acceleration. It’s all the other computerised gubbins they hang off them that I dislike, and Teslas are the worst for that.
I saw an old VW Beetle that had been converted to electric on the road recently. I wonder how hard/expensive it would be to do that with my 2 when the engine dies.
Every study ever done on the subject has concluded that vehicle fires happen far less in electric vehicles than ICE ones. If you want to talk about responsibility we would ban them all.
100 fires that you can actually put out is better than 1 you can’t.
Brother if your life is dependent on someone coming to put out the fire, you’re not gonna make it.
“Brother” putting words in people’s mouth is literally definition of bad faith.
I was not speaking for terms of “life”. Though life certainly is affected by the problems.
Lithium fires cause immensely more damage than ICE fires do. Hell just think of a benign situation like a car catch fire under a bridge. A BEV is more likely to structurally damage the bridge than an ICE fire would.
Lithium fires burn much hotter and spread much faster since it’s self-oxidizing. I’ll take an ICE fire any day since they will burn slower just by it’s very nature. I will have more protection by sheer thermal mass in between me and the firey bit (the engine) than I do would with an EV where the battery is literally underneath the entire passenger cabin.
It’s well known that BEV fires are much more destructive. The fact that they happen less often doesn’t fix the fact that it ends up being a wash all around.
Edit: Eg, more often x less damage = less often x more damage
“Brother” putting words in people’s mouth is literally definition of bad faith.
Good thing no one did that?
I was not speaking for terms of “life”.
I mean that’s pretty clearly the topic at hand, and the most important one.
Lithium fires cause immensely more damage than ICE fires do.
Damage to what? There ain’t gonna be anything left of the car either way.
think of a benign situation like a car catch fire under a bridge
That’s an extremely obscure and cherry-picked scenario to make your point.
I will have more protection by sheer thermal mass in between me and the firey bit
Thermal mass is not relevant. You don’t die from metal contact, you die from smoke inhalation.
The fact that they happen less often doesn’t fix the fact that it ends up being a wash all around.
It absolutely is not, and the mere insinuation otherwise leads me to believe you’re just being disingenuous.
Good thing no one did that?
You did.
Damage to what? There ain’t gonna be anything left of the car either way.
Factually wrong. ICE cars are much much easier to put out. Often times ICE engine fires can put themselves out. And since they burn slower anyway, it’s more likely you can escape the fire in of itself. Eg. if the fire occurs from a runway combustion in the chamber and the engine locks up starving the combustion chamber from oxygen.
That’s an extremely obscure and cherry-picked scenario to make your point.
Not really? There’s a lot of bridges on the planet… There’s lots of tunnels on the planet. There’s lots of infrastructure that is a part of our roadways or are close enough to roadways to be affected. Tunnels are actually an even better problem to discuss. Heavy metal toxicity will stick around a lot longer and cause much more problems than an ICE engine that can actually be doused out 1/10th of the way through the burn.
Thermal mass is not relevant. You don’t die from metal contact, you die from smoke inhalation.
More things between you and the fire = more protection overall… period. And you want to talk about people being disingenuous?
Edit 1 week later: A good example of some of the problems of an BEV fire… Look at the CA fires. Palisades and Eaton fires.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=GM1sUx96wbE
“It’s chromium, it’s arsenic, it’s lead, it’s all these things that’s coming up hot for all these chemicals we haven’t had to deal with in these situations until now with all the EVs and stuff like that.” - Ex-firefighter, now insurance claims adjuster.
Factually wrong.
It’s not. And you didn’t even bother to dispute it.
Eg. if the fire occurs from a runway combustion in the chamber and the engine locks up starving the combustion chamber from oxygen.
😂🤣😂🤣 what? There’s supposed to be fire in the combustion chamber. If it doesn’t leave there, it’s not “a fire”. If it does leave there, the engine locking up does nothing.
More things between you and the fire = more protection overall… period.
If there’s something between you and the fire then there’s not a threat to life.
Humans first
They don’t need to be banned. We just need to not buy them.
Article does not actually answer why Tesla vehicles crash as much as they do or how their crash frequency compares to other vehicles. Its more about how scummy tesla is as a company and how it witholds data from the public when it could incriminate them.
In some ways that is the answer. Crashes keep happening because they are not being held accountable to regulators because they are not reporting these incidents and no one is exercising oversight to be sure the reporting matches reality.
I think over the years, accurate reporting by manufacturers has been done because they generally do not want to be known as that car company that killed a child and it could have been prevented with a 50 cent bolt. As a result, regulators have been less hawkish. Of course there are probably political donations in the US to help keep the wheels turning.
just scanning the article, it seems to sum it up as - No one knows why yet, not even Tesla ’
With a dash of - Tesla might know and be withholding information
It’s much more likely that they don’t know. Look at the DOGE staffers hand picked by musk, they are completely incompetent but hyper confident. If they’re indicative of the software engineers working at Tesla, then they most likely assumed their code was perfect. Keep in mind it’s all running on LLM code now.
Yeah, it’s because they didn’t put a lidar on their fucking cars because they’re cheap, It’s not a mystery, why don’t you know this?
That you, Elon?
Tesla tried to do it all at once instead of perfecting the electric tech first and then incrementally adding on advances. They also made change for change’s sake. There’s absolutely no reason mechanical door locks could not have been engineered to work on this car as the default method of opening and closing the door. It’s killing people.
There’s absolutely a reason to not engineer something you’re not required to. It’s called capitalism. Tesla cut every corner they could.
No, the problem is they engineered something they didn’t need to, because Musk thinks everything should be electric because it’s cool. They had to then engineer a mechanical release, because it was required by law (for good reason)
Mechanical door locks would have been cheaper. The fly by wire in the cyber truck is far more expensive, heavier, and far more dangerous than the very well polished power steering systems every other car uses
Maybe it’s something like they wanted to make more money on repairs or something… But even that they could’ve done better by starting from very common, cheap technology
Let’s be clear… The real problem here is that Elon Musk, opinion having idiot that he is, made decisions from on high with very little understanding of engineering
Musk thinks everything should be electric because it’s cool.
I strongly disagree. Things are getting more and more electric across all manufacturing because it is cheap. A single touch screen that drops in place under a snap on bezel with a premade cable harness and some programming time is so much faster and cheaper than designing, installing, wiring, coding, and testing physical buttons or mechanical linkages. PCBs can be tested in a negligible amount of time.
Mechanical door locks would have been cheaper.
No. Sorry, but no. The locks were going to be electrically operated no matter what. But the inclusion of standard mechanical components would increase the cost significantly.
very common, cheap technology
Yes, but that would be electrical components. It’s not very intuitive, I agree. But cost is the sole reason things are becoming more “electronic”. Electronics are extremely cheap compared to their analog ancestors. And not only that, but since very few mfrs are using off the shelf mechanical components, they are now less supplied and harder to get. So their cost is going up. Electronics are going down.
I don’t know the engineering endeavors that he may or may not have been directly involved with. I’m not entirely sure what “from on high” means, but I would presume you are referring to his net value and authority. In that case, I would say he is no different than literally any other CEO. He made decisions that made him a profit. That’s what they do. GE is a great test case for this. Nearly destroyed the company in the long term so that board members see a small financial gain in the short term, then dump the carcass on the next guy. It’s just money. That’s all.
Yes, electronics are very cheap… But remember the part where they also have a mechanical mechanism? They have two systems, where most cars have this very simple lock that connects to a tiny motor assembly. It’s literally a piece of plastic and a few wires
The tablet thing is true, they’ve changed cars to computerize everything, and once you’ve done that you can connect everything over a network. Every button needs to do back to a chip to become a digital signal, so before you had these complex one-off wiring harnesses for everything
But the tablet thing is again, common. It makes sense, it’s just worse
But Elon is a unique case. Elon likes to actually make decisions, because he thinks he’s Tony Stark. He actually goes down into teams and hangs out, and they have to just work around whatever decisions he makes. It’s present in all of his companies, but you can see it most in Twitter, because they didn’t have time to build a team to strategically distract him when he comes to visit
This absolute idiot has spent the last month trying to get grok to be a literal Nazi. First, he added a bunch of white genocide to the prompt, making it change the topic to that from any question for a few days.
Now it’s responding all confused, and saying things like “I never gave Jeffrey Epstein tours of spaceX or Tesla” when asked it Elon did it. Seems to me they fed Elon’s tweets in the RAG system in a amateur way
He micromanages and meddles constantly… That’s what he does at his companies
For a counterexample, Jeff Bezos. He was heavily involved in the fire phone, and had some genuinely cool ideas… But the priorities were all wrong, so it flopped. He learned his lesson
Elon : some of you will die, but that is a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
Luigi: lol same
By your logic then, capitalism is great, because that means no one would’ve engineered these crazy locks but instead just used the tried and true ones.
Wait. That’s not what happened?
Oh.
engineered these crazy locks
I would joke that since they don’t work then I doubt any engineering went into them at all. But I know that isn’t true.
So I wonder if you could elaborate on what you mean by “crazy locks”? I did a lot of work investigating the manufacturing equipment and their use, so I remember a bit about their components, design, and assembly; but I did not work with those directly so I could be missing something entirely. I don’t remember there being anything groundbreaking about the mechanics of the door locks. But the general build always felt… “thinner”. Most manufacturers stay away from minimum standards by at least the standard deviation or two, so if the required gauge was 18 ± 1, a typical mfr would use 20+. Tesla would use 18. On the nose. That was a lot more common in automotive but even hyundai/kia used wide margins for safety. All that to say, I have a hard time believing the door locks were so complex that a sizable investment would be anything other than reinventing the wheel, but even moreso that it was even worth the superfluous cost.
One of the last jobs I had there was a machine that they picked up third hand and cobbled together with some very sketchy safety systems that wildly failed requirements. I was there for days and it was one of the more extensive reports I’ve ever made on a single installation. The control system was designed by the onsite engineers and passed flawlessly. But they had a lot to do to get the equipment usable.
I stopped reading when you suggested 20 gauge was heavier than 18 gauge.
Rookie mistake you can’t come back from.
Lol, I saw that after I sent it, but was absolutely not confident enough to change it. I don’t work in that field any more so that is not the only thing about materials that you probably know better than me. And I’m sorry for the wall of text. My bad.
Also, the fact that they removed Lidar sensors and just base their self driving on cameras is plainly stupid.
Technical debt.
If you promise self driving on all cars, but cars already on the road don’t have lidar then no car has lidar.
That’s not really the case, as Elon’s already admitted that there are at least about a half a million Teslas with old HW3 self driving computers that need to have them upgraded to HW4 for them to have the chance at eventually get the FSD the buyers were promised. That’s not even mentioning the upgraded cameras the HW4 vehicles have gotten. The reason for Musk not wanting lidar on Teslas is very simple: cost. He thinks it’s too expensive and unnecessary, unlike every single other manufacturer working on the same problem.
Upgrading a computer is very different to adding a new sensor array all around the body.
I’m not saying upgrading older cars the only reason for excluding lidar, but I bet it was a large factor.
I mean it’s all true:
- humans drive based on vision alone
- moving to one type of sensor simplifies the ai
- lidar has been much bulkier, much more expensive than other sensors.
Most importantly, since no one has self driving yet, it’s premature to talk about that as a mistake. Let it fail or succeed on its merits. Let other self-driving attempts fail or succeed on their merits.
Do you have an example of another serious company working on the problem that also has concluded that lidar is unnecessary? Because I don’t.
I’m not an expert, but as I understand it, the consensus (excluding Musk of course) seems to be that lidar is necessary for proper functioning and safety in poor visibility situations, like in rain, fog or general darkness. I think the odds are good that the judgment of an overwhelming majority of companies is more correct than the judgment of Musk alone. Particularly considering Musk’s proven track record of cost cutting that puts users’ lives in danger, for example not being able to manually open the doors of burning Teslas.
Lidar has strengths that complement where video has weaknesses. That seems like a good thing. However it is bulky and expensive, and not yet produced at scale. Those are bad things. Whether it really makes a difference in simplifying the machine learning, only those developers know. You have to balance the pluses and minuses, and just because one company came up with something different, doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
Maybe it won’t work without lidar but maybe it will - in the meantime Tesla has saved like $1,000/car times however many million they produce. If they succeed, then they have a solid cost and scalability advantage
The deciding point is if someone does develop general self-driving. Will those who are behind be able to swallow their pride and modify their approach?
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When the sun shines in your eyes, do you not put on sunglasses? Cameras can’t do that.
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When you have dirt in your eyes, do you not rub it out? Cameras can’t do that.
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When something is obstructing your view, do you not move you head to the side until it is not? Cameras can’t do that.
Humans are much more than cameras and a brain.
And even if they were, shouldn’t we aim for something better than we currently have?
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“humans drive based on vision alone”
Not quite. We use our sense of touch and direction to feel our momentum, like how hard a turn or acceleration is. We can feel steering traction changes like when tires begin to slip under acceleration/deceleration. We feel when we’re starting to hydroplane. Cars are a cornucipia of touch feedback that drivers respond to.
Sure but if you make that argument, even relatively dumb cars have that as well. At least antilock brakes have been mandatory for a few years (in the US) and traction control might be as well. Both lead to immediate adjustments in driving, more quickly than any human can react.
More automated cars must have some equivalent feedback on balance, sharpness of turns. I don’t know what it is, but they generally execute smooth comfortable turns.
"Both lead to immediate adjustments in driving, more quickly than any human can react. "
Again, sort of. ABS isn’t quicker than humans react, it’s a stopgap measure for divers without sufficient skill. It only turns on after you have fucked up and locked your breaks.
“I don’t know what it is, but they generally execute smooth comfortable turns.”
Likely a combination of software that defines comfortable zones, including adhering to speed limits and paired with an accelerometer.
I think we are still a very long way off from autodrive. Being able to handle changing conditions like freezing rain and black ice or a flooded road will take time.
Waymo runs a taxi service at scale.
They don’t though. Waymo runs a few pilots in a few specific geolocked locations with essentially hand built cars at a huge loss. They also have human remote supervisions. They do seem fairly successful and maybe their slow careful rollout will eventually be at scale in the areas that need it most. Hopefully it will work.
While it’s easy to argue Tesla hasn’t had those successes yet, they do have the “at scale” part down and are already profitable on the vehicles. They are close enough to self-driving them at they’re willing to try their own pilots with human intervention. If they succeed, they already have the scaling up done and are profitable on hardware so will quickly surpass other competitors.
I like that different companies are taking different approaches, so we have competition. May the best technology succeed!
This is a wonderful attitude to have as long as it’s not in the comments of an article about how Tesla’s approach is trapping people and burning them alive.
In this crash, part of the blame was on retracting handles on the outside, not the interior locks. If the handle is retracted, it’s tough to open the door from the outside.
- model s has electrically presented handles. The car has to be somewhat functional for the handles to extend …. I haven’t heard of extend on emergency or extend on power lost, or any other failsafe
- model 3/y door handles are not electrical. You have to press on one end to extend the other. You may or may not like them, but at least they don’t have that failure case of what happens when the car loses power
Just FYI all the Tesla cars to my knowledge need power for the doors to open because the handles aren’t physically attached to the door mechanism. They’re all electronic. If you own one of these cars I highly advise you to read the manual and find out where the mechanical door releases are(they’re somewhat hidden).
Another fun fact and this isn’t exclusive to Tesla. If you pay attention when you open the door the window retracts a tiny bit to clear the weatherstripping. If you have no power that can’t happened. What is unique to Tesla as far as I can tell is that their weatherstripping isn’t as large/pliable as other manufacturers or maybe it’s just the assembly. Using the mechanical release with power still retracts the window. In the event the battery is dead or damaged from an accident using the mechanical release requires breaking the window. That means the door is significantly more difficult to open.
No. Window retracting on door opening is no different than other cars with frameless windows. Most lowering the window may damage the weatherstripping but is no impediment to door opening.
True that the door latch itself is just a solenoid. I actually forgot the the outside handles don’t do anything but give you something to pull on.
The worst part of the manual door release is that it’s different on each model. For mine, the front door manual release is easily accessible to the point I have to tell people not to use it. Back door is a problem though
I mentioned the retracting window isn’t exclusive to Tesla. The issue is with how they work when they no longer retract and that appears to be a Tesla problem. It’s not an issue if the window has power.
Tesla forum No power, broken window.
Random article where parts of the car had power and others didn’t. Broken window as result.
Another article about broken windows using the mechanical release with lack of power.
This is the kind of shit that makes me worried even seeing someone else driving one of these deathtraps near me while I am driving. They could explode or decide to turn into me on the highway or something. I think I about this more than Final Destination when seeing a logging truck these days.
It’s one of those rules you make for yourself when you drive…
Like no driving next to people with dents…
Or
Stay away from trucks with random shit in the back not strapped down …
No driving near New cars, they are new and or it’s because they got into an accident so best just be safe…
So
No driving near a Tesla…
Wait, I might know the answer. Is it because they don’t use LIDAR and they’re made by a company headed by some piece of shit who likes to cut costs? Haha, I was just guessing, but ok.
You can choose not to drive bleeding edge technology, but sadly you have no choice in whether to share the road with it.
I drive a BMW i4 and one of the reasons I prefer it is because it still uses a number of mechanical options like physical buttons and an actual door handle. I never trusted that flush handle from Tesla, even back when I liked Tesla.
I have never ridden a Tesla, and I plan on requesting a non Tesla car from now on when I have to take a taxi.
Cars in general, Teslas in particular, should have a standardized blackbox data recorder that third parties can open and access the logs, we have had this kind of tech on aircrafts for many decades.
It is terrifying that Tesla can just say that there was no relevant data and the investigative agency will just accept that.
I remember watching an episode of Air Crash Investigations, where a plane crashed, and they could not find an immediate cause, but the flight data recorder was able to be analysed far back, way before the accident flight, and they noticed that a mount for the APU turbine had broken many flights earlier, and the APU had broken free during the flight, causing the crash.
It is not Tesla’s job to tell the investigators what is relevant and not, it is Teslas job to unlock all data they have and send it to the investigators, if they can’t or won’t, then Tesla should lose the right sell cars in Europe
Cars do have that in what amounts to a TCU or Telematics Control Unit. The main problem here isn’t whether or not cars have that technology. It’s about the relevant government agency forcing companies like Tesla (and other automakers) to produce that data not just when there’s a crash, but as a matter of course.
I have a lot of questions about why Tesla’s are allowed on public roads when some of the models haven’t been crash tested. I have a lot of questions about why a company wouldn’t hand over data in the event of a crash without the requirement of a court order. I don’t necessarily agree that cars should be able to track us (if I buy it I own it and nobody should have that kind of data without my say so). But since we already have cars that do phone this data home, local, state, and federal government should have access to it. Especially when insurance companies are happy to use it to place blame in the event of a crash so they don’t have to pay out an insurance policy.
They do have an EDR you can access.
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
Bad code. Guinea pig owners. Cars not communicating with each other. Relying on just the car’s vision and location is stupid.
Also, not only do they rely on “just vision”, crucially they rely on real-time processing without any memory or persistent mapping.
This, more than anything else is what bewilders me most.
They could map an area, and when observing a construction hazard save that data and share it with other vehicles so they know when route setting or anticipate the object. Not they don’t. If it drives past a hazard and goes around the block it has to figure out how to navigate the hazard again with no familiarity. That’s so foolish.
and what’s even more ridiculous than that (imo) is that if every tesla mapped the area, you’d get it from loads of different angles: no more “oops 1 off computer vision edge case”
indeed. new experiences should be remembered…like a human.
If they would use lidar you would get speed and distance from surrounding objects, which seems like valuable data for a moving object. With cameras you get a 2d picture that can only guestimate distance using multiple cameras and software.
