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‘The vehicle suddenly accelerated with our baby in it’: the terrifying truth about why Tesla’s cars keep crashing (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

165 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] [email protected] 69 points 5 days ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 5 days ago (9 children)

There's absolutely a reason to not engineer something you're not required to. It's called capitalism. Tesla cut every corner they could.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Also, the fact that they removed Lidar sensors and just base their self driving on cameras is plainly stupid.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 days ago (12 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 5 days ago

You can choose not to drive bleeding edge technology, but sadly you have no choice in whether to share the road with it.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Move fast and break things, but it's a passenger vehicle on a public road.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 days ago

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

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