2 die after Tesla ‘on auto-pilot with no one in driving seat’ crashes into tree – IOTW Report

2 die after Tesla ‘on auto-pilot with no one in driving seat’ crashes into tree

Sunday, 18 April 2021, 18:00 MJA Uncategorized 32

and starts massive four-hour fire that took 32,000 GALLONS of water to extinguish.

32 Comments on 2 die after Tesla ‘on auto-pilot with no one in driving seat’ crashes into tree

  1. KPRC 2 reporter Deven Clarke spoke to one man’s brother-in-law who said he was taking the car out for a spin with his best friend, so there were just two in the vehicle.

    The owner, he said, backed out of the driveway, and then may have hopped in the back seat only to crash a few hundred yards down the road. He said the owner was found in the back seat upright.

    The brother-in-law of one of the victims said relatives watched the car burn for four hours as authorities tried to tap out the flames.

    https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2021/04/18/2-men-dead-after-fiery-tesla-crash-in-spring-officials-say/

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  14. …battery fires suck. I can’t tell you how many times in the top post battery days I pried a hood open to find the battery welded to the hood, burst, and spewing hot, pressurized acid through the flames.

    And this was the little 12×14 car starter batteries.

    The big batteries to move cars are a little after my firefighter time, but I can well imagine that it’s that x10. Plus, more amps, more life hazard, and virtually inaccessible without dismantling the car, which would be problematic since they’re so heavy and full of toxic things.

    See, in latter days I work on autonomous factory vehicles, and I know that the battery weight is an important part of the handling and traction of the vehicle, and as such it has to be pretty central even in the low speed cargo handlers I work with, let alone in a high speed performance automobile. They want them to look pretty too, which translates as burying battery access even more with dress-up panels and such.

    And I don’t know if it’s the kind with the hide-a-handle thing that doesn’t work when the battery is on fire, but THAT kills Tesla owners, too.

    https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a29576096/tesla-model-s-lawsuit-door-handles-fire/

    …now about the “autonomous” part.

    …I don’t know Teslas specifically, but I’ve got a quarter century in automated vehicles so I know a bit about them. They do wonderfully if dealing with predictable things and all their inputs and outputs work right, because a guy can sit at a computer and write algorithms for coping with the predictable, which is ALL the vehicle “knows”. As I’ve said before, the “brains” in the car are REALLY the brains of the programmer, and if HE doesn’t anticipate something, the vehicle can’t deal with it.

    The automated vehicles I work with communicate with each other via a host, and the host manages the traffic control between them. They operate on a flat floor with people specifically trained to be around them, and move at maybe 5 MPH on the straights. They are equipped with rotating laser safety devices to detect hazards at a range to slow, then stop them.

    And they still have incidents.

    See, the forklifts do NOT communicate with them, and forklift drivers aren’t the most careful people in the world, and because the forklift drivers do unpredictable things at speeds and angles the vehicles aren’t programmed to deal with, sometimes bad things happen and damage occurs despite decades of modern automation engineering.

    Now put this out in the wild, with the sorts of people who cut you off every day, with wind and water and bad roads and fast high trucks and indifferent car maintenance, and the problems get muuuuch more complicated.

    …even the best, most advanced, most developed and thought out vehicle automation system, the autopilot, can be completely disabled by a piece of tape or a chunk of ice. Even those systems have a limit at which they will disconnect and require the pilot to do some piloting, usually with little to no warning.

    Which is why they BOTH DO NOT LEAVE THEIR SEATS AT THE SAME TIME.

    I don’t know the details, but I do know this, as a student of and developer of vehicle automation systems.

    It’s stupid to trust ANY automation that completely.

    …I manage three buildings full of automated lines with programmable controllers and Cartesian, Delta, and gantry robots, each made by a specialist company to our specific requirements, purpose built for the dedicated task they were created for and installed in a controlled environment.

    They also each have a trained operator who is on the line at all times.

    This is because there can ALWAYS be things that happen outside of the programmed limits of even such specific machinery.

    So a human is still the ultimate redundant system.

    …at its BEST, automation is an AJUNCT to performing a repetitive, predictable task. In cars, few tasks are predictable and repetitive, so a human hand MUST always be near.

    Trusting automation so completely is, was, and ever shall be, stupid.

    Machines assist man.

    They do NOT replace him…

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  15. Ummm, water???
    I once asked a fire captain what he considered the most dangerous type of fire he encountered. He said car fires, because there are so many chemicals, plastics, fluids, etc. that they are a huge poison hazard.

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  17. Left Coast Dan
    APRIL 18, 2021 AT 6:57 PM
    Ummm, water???
    “He said car fires, because there are so many chemicals, plastics, fluids, etc. that they are a huge poison hazard.”

    …they also throw things at you, sometimes at high speeds. All those hydraulic cylinders on the hood, the trunk, the energy absorbers in the bumpers, the shocks, have shafts that become projectiles if they boil long enough.

    And lots of stored volatile chemicals like gas and oil and battery acid that can blow out on you.

    And open a hood or trunk and the fire pops out at you.

    But COPIOUS amounts of water, applied properly, can put most things out.

    A broken stream is used in electrical fires, but yeah, you DO de-energize as quickly as practicable.

    Few departments carry foam or high volume chemical agents, so you kind of have to go with what you have.

    But it ain’t no garden hose…

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  25. In other news, I picked up a 6 speed manual turbo 350-HP, 350-ft lbs torque (stock) shitbox car that hauls ass and burns premium gas.

    Why? Because you’re not going to be able to buy them real soon. It’s hard enough to find a decent manual right now as it is. When I get in a car I like to drive a car. Fascination with autonomous electric driving makes zero sense to me.

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  28. “No one in the driver’s seat…”

    Just like Washington, DC and the current Administration.

    All that story needed was “two gay males were found inverted and naked in the back seat” — Eleanor

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  31. So no one behind the wheel. 1000 pound battery fully charged. Cul de sack and Mother Nature takes over. Geez. Who couldn’t see this was coming. So many smug Tesla owners with these things parked in the garages. Time bombs. Try putting out house fires with the roof covered in solar panels. Nope.

    I’ll stick to my Duece and a Half.

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