OT Tesla kills it's passengers on Easy St and firemen DON'T KNOW how to put the fire out!

You don't actually have anything to say, do you?

Did you read any of this? Do you have a point?

Words of wisdom. So do you have a point?

I didn't think so.

Strange. That article has disappeared.

RL

I'm wondering about this 'getting into the back seat' business.

I wonder if the owner wasn't demonstrating this peculiar behavior of the vehicle to his passenger - something he'd noticed before - only this time the car got away on him . . . ?

RL

Two points I'd like to make. One is, take a look at the location of the accident. This is on a winding cul-de-sac with no stretch of road long enough to run up speed.

The other is I checked today and found the seat sensor is NOT checked either when the autopilot is engaged or after it is engaged. I could hold my ass out of the seat and engage the autopilot. So there is some bad information about the sensors used with the autopilot.

Unbuckling the seat belt did freak out the car, but that is easy enough to get around.

Here are some facts about the accident. It was not blazing for hours. The firemen could not disturb the scene because of the deaths, so once they got the fire under control (2-3 minutes), "we were simply pouring a little bit of water on it. It was not because flames were coming out".

Musk claims the autopilot was not engaged at the time of the accident.

This seems to be a story greatly exaggerated in the telling.

On Wednesday, 21 April 2021 at 14:47:49 UTC-7, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote: ...

... Tesla (and other EV manufacturers) provide 'First Responders' documentation to instruct them in safely disabling and extinguishing fires in crashed vehicles as well as how to gain access to the car to rescue victims.

I think just about everyone talking about the incident is full of s*it. I think the media is full of s*it with respect to the severity of the fire and how the firefighting process went down, and I think Musk is full of s*it claiming that the autopilot wasn't engaged.

Yeah, I've been reading in the Tesla forum and most of the facts are exaggerated by either the Police or the news reports or both. A fire chief said the fire was out within three minutes of them arriving. They continued to use "small" amounts of water to keep the battery cool so it would not continue to resume burning. They would have dealt with it more aggressively, but once they found the bodies they had to treat it as a crime scene and could not disturb the car, so they just kept it wet.

There is no reason to think the car was on autopilot. I checked the road they were on and the autopilot could not have accelerated to the required speeds on such a short road in a residential neighborhood. A person could have if they were testing the zero to sixty time.

I don't know why you doubt Musk in saying the car was not on autopilot at the time of the accident. They can access that remotely. In fact, it may be that the car automatically reports the info once it detects that a crash has happened. Someone alluded to that in the Tesla forum although that is not authoritative.

We will find out in a few weeks I suppose, although the NHTSA reports are typically very mechanical.

You can fool the wheel sensor and looks like the older revisions of the Model S firmware let you engage autopilot in some sus places without lines:

"One big change recently, the car has been allowing me to activate Autopilot on roads that previously it would never allow me to! (Please! Don't attempt these tests! They can be dangerous!)"

Could it have been running an older firmware? As I understand it you have to consent to updates.

So the options are basically car was on autopilot (unlikely according to Tesla), driver was somehow flung to the back seat in the crash so it looked like nobody was driving in the aftermath (seems unlikely), or the first responders were lying/mistaken about the position of the bodies (also seems unlikely)

Sorry, one occupant was found in the front passenger seat.

Oh, I forgot another possibility, the occupants were doing something extraordinarily stupid like gunning the thing up to 85 and then the driver hop over to the passenger seat and go "hands free" to see what it would do.

Yeah, but it's a big PITA to put off. The car prompts you EVERY time you start. It's just a box you have to click away, but I don't have the patience to ignore it.

Even if it can be engaged on a lineless road, it's pretty inconceivable to then climb out of the seat, etc. etc...

I remember a joke from many years ago about someone (probably of some ethnic group) put on the cruise control in an RV, then went to the back to make a sandwich. Climbing into the back seat with the autopilot on is even more absurd.

On the road I drove today at the legal speed limit the autopilot could not manage and complained very loudly a couple of times. Rural roads are not friendly to autonomous vehicles and it's going to be a while, not withstanding anything Musk says about robotaxis being ready to roll out "next year". I think he said that in 2019, so he missed 2020. Think that will happen in 2021? 2025? 2050?

I feel like extraordinary stupidity was very likely to be involved somehow, though it will probably take some time to find out exactly what type.

Providence RI already has one, I seen this thing poking around sometimes when I go to charge up near my girlfriend's place.

It does all of about 25 mph hugging the side of the road. Your job as a driver is mainly not to hit it, not the reverse

The "legacy" auto manufacturers seem to be betting that 95% of drivers don't give a s*it about OTA updates.

This "legacy" driver only wants update (perhaps an SD card) on the navigation map. Don't want anything to change on the car itself, especially not something to be hacked OTA.

Not really robotaxi since there is a driver/nurse maid. Even so, it is on a fixed route and highly optimized for that area. I doubt it would work so well in other parts of the city or especially outside the city.

My point was Musk was talking specifically about people buying model 3 to be using them to generate funds as robotaxis without a driver. As usual, Musk was talking about his crystal ball, not reality.

Personally I think that is one of the features of the Teslas that is worth putting up with the other BS. You can buy a navigator for a hundred bucks or use your phone for the price of the data rates. GM wants something on the order of $1,000 to update the stinkin' maps on a built in navigator. No, they are not going to win this one.

That said, I believe Tesla has a monthly fee for Premium Connectivity which includes live traffic and music streaming, something nominal, like $10 per I think. It also allows software updates over cell networks which otherwise require a wifi internet connection.

The price that OnStar wants to put an LTE WiFi hotspot in a GM car are silly, $15/month for 2 gig cap or $25/month for "unlimited." I just use my cell phone.

Actually correction just about every service OnStar offers is silly.