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 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.
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.
There’s absolutely a reason to not engineer something you’re not required to. It’s called capitalism. Tesla cut every corner they could.
Elon : some of you will die, but that is a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
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.
Upgrading a computer is very different to adding a new sensor array all around the body.
I’m not saying upgrading older cars the only reason for excluding lidar, but I bet it was a large factor.
I mean it’s all true:
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.
“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.
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.