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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe take the baby out so it slows down?
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.
Removed by mod
You should nuke us. We’re hopeless.
Quarrantine, a cordon sanitaire.
It’s simple, you condemn Elon just because you envy him.
Bait used to be believable.
Lol
Clearly this premise, upon which your further exchanges is based, is complete bullshit.
You are a troll, presumably one for whom any response is a win. It gives you a little dopamine hit.
What a pathetic place to get to - there are a million ways to get a dopamine hit less pathetic than this, including all of the major addictive drugs.
oh yes, I felt good just now…
The very least he could do is not sell unsafe vehicles. It’s literally the very least he can do but he can’t be asked to do that because of his ego. I condemn him for that.
Lord, just think about how many people any other car manufacturer kills…
Is the best defence you have is it everyone else is just as bad that’s not really he defence, that’s just coopism.
Just don’t cry for God’s sake
I guess you’re one of those I got mine fuck you types. Booooring
I am one of those who do not participate in the circus performance. I just sit in the front row and watch the clowns.
This statement works from anyone’s PoV.
Don’t cut yourself on that edge.
It wasn’t me who said this; it’s a quote from George Carlin. But I agree with it 100%.
Obviously you don’t know what a ‘quote’ is. Carlin never said such a thing. I don’t need to look it up to know he never said that, because Carlin was perhaps the best comedy writer of all time, and your ‘quote’ seems like it’s engineered to be unfunny.
its on you if you bought a tesla after the twitter purchase, cant have buyers remorse.
Other road users don’t have anything to do with it though, including those who aren’t even driving
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.
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.
There’s absolutely a reason to not engineer something you’re not required to. It’s called capitalism. Tesla cut every corner they could.
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.
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
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.
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.
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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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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.
“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.
You can choose not to drive bleeding edge technology, but sadly you have no choice in whether to share the road with it.
Seems like a lot of this technology is very untested and there are too many variables to make it where it should 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
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…
FYI, some numbers. The guardian article is still definitely worth reading, it just had no statistics.
*Nationally (USA), Tesla drivers had 26.67 accidents per 1,000 drivers. This was up from 23.54 last year.
The Ram and Subaru brands were again among the most accident-prone. Ram had 23.15 per 1,000 drivers while Subaru had 22.89.
…
As of October 2024, there have been hundreds of documented nonfatal incidents involving Autopilot and fifty-one reported fatalities, forty-four of which NHTSA investigations or expert testimony later verified and two that NHTSA’s Office of Defect Investigations verified as happening during the engagement of Full Self-Driving (FSD).*
