3w ago

‘The vehicle suddenly accelerated with our baby in it’: the terrifying truth about why Tesla’s cars keep crashing

www.theguardian.com

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.

88 comments

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.
  
  And the people who knowingly put profits before lives would be individually serve time for manslaughter.
  
  Tesla would be charged to dissolve, or forced to forfeit assets to the government.
- 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.
- They don’t need to be banned. We just need to not buy them.
- Humans first
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
  
  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
  
  Elon : some of you will die, but that is a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
  
  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.
- Also, the fact that they removed Lidar sensors and just base their self driving on cameras is plainly stupid.
- 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.
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.
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.
the truth? Because Elon is the CEO errrr Teknoking.
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.
- Other road users don't have anything to do with it though, including those who aren't even driving
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.
News of malfunctioning Tesla cars and Musk going crazy are still not enough to crash Tesla stocks to zero. Which I am hoping will happen not just to inflict sorrow on Musk and his wealth, but so that I could hedge against the stock 😂
- You should nuke us. We're hopeless.
- Quarrantine, a cordon sanitaire.
- I'm almost won over by your charming manners, but...
  What is your source?
  What happens when the severity of accidents are taken into account? Because it could be this: Tesla Has the Highest Fatal Accident Rate of All Auto Brands, Study Finds
  Tesla's self-driving features expose their cars to a distinctive kind of risk. It would be important to distinguish the accidents where this played a part.
  Regardless of the statistics, there are some other clear design problems with Tesla's, such as batteries that explode in a crash and doors that won't open without power (not to mention autopilot's limited camera-only inputs and software glitches). These are still concerns specific to Tesla that other brands don't share, so again it's worth reviewing accidents where these played a role when gauging Tesla's safety.
- That's some nice fact cherry picking, and it ignores Tesla's ongoing campaign to hide and obfuscate their crash records from the NHTSA and the public.
- 510 reviewed crashes, resulting in one REVIEWED crash for every 5,098 Teslas
  you dropped a unit in your analysis. I fixed it for you.
- you are an embarrassment
- Reported and reviewed are the same word so your math checks out.
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.
It's simple, you condemn Elon just because you envy him.
- 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.
- Clearly this premise, upon which your further exchanges are 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.
  
  Don't feed the troll.
  
  oh yes, I felt good just now...
- Bait used to be believable.
- 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...
- Lol
supercars...
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).
At 3.18pm on 10 May 2018, Stefan Meier lost control of his Model S on the A2 highway near the Monte Ceneri tunnel. Travelling at about 100kmh (62mph), he ploughed through several warning markers and traffic signs before crashing into a slanted guardrail. “The collision with the guardrail launches the vehicle into the air, where it flips several times before landing,” investigators would write later.
The driver crashed, it doesn't sound like it was in self driving mode.
- The car doesn't have to be in self driving mode for the fault to be Tesla's - for example, the pedals on the cybertruck sliding off and sticking down the accelerator.
  
  A stuck pedal turns the steering towards the barrier? I think the driver had a stroke or heart attack and stopped steering
Maybe take the baby out so it slows down?

88 comments