Lot of news about a Tesla that smashed into a tree

[Suff]

On so called "self driving software".

Tesla has only one "self drive" software and it is currently in Beta. This owner who is beta testing the current self driving software wanted to set the record straight.

https://youtu.be/9KtkIarbnMg

BTW, I believe Tesla fixed this issue of getting out of the seat in AutoPilot after version 1. So you do have to try pretty hard to actually get a Tesla to drive itself without a driver in the seat. Into a tree or otherwise.

[Suff]

Update

There are safety measures in place with the autopilot Seat is weighted to make sure there is a driver, hands must be on steering wheel every 10 seconds or it disengages. Autopilot doesn’t go over the speed limits ...

Elon Musk:
Your research as a private individual is better than professionals @WSJ!
Data logs recovered so far show Autopilot was not enabled & this car did not purchase FSD.
Moreover, standard Autopilot would require lane lines to turn on, which this street did not have.

Entries for the Darwin Awards?

[Workingman]

Entries for the Darwin Awards?

Who, people who buy vehicles with autopilot? Well obviously.

"Tesla did not comment but it has previously said drivers should keep their hands on the steering wheel and pay attention while using Autopilot." Therefore as pointless a bit of kit as anyone could imagine. Cars have a steering wheel for a reason!

The link is from Twitter and the top lines are from some random woke snowflake, fanboy and ardent retweeter from Nigeria. An expert! Not.

OK, there are questions about the autopilot, but what about the fire? After smashing into the tree its lithium ion battery pack ignited. The fire brigade used 105,000 litres of water over four hours to stop it burning. Silence from Tesla.

[Suff]

There is no question about the autopilot. Logs from the vehicle show it was not on. End of story end of news about some rogue AI based driving system smashing into a tree.

As for taking so long to put it out? Well that's a problem. But it is a local problem. As I pointed out on another forum, when a petrol vehicle was crushed and the fuel tank split open, it took half a dozen vehicles and two trucks with it. Once the Diesel on the trucks went there was not way of stopping it.

Yes it is a problem. But so is carrying around 50 litres of highly flammable fuel. We are just used to the fuel so we dismiss it. Remember when the two trains collided outside London? It was the diesel from the 125's tanks which killed most people. Hardly publicised, we wouldn't want people to be scared of them now would we?

These batteries are no more flammable than a tank full of Petrol. In fact they carry far less energy than a tank full of petrol. The fire is localised to the vehicle and, unless it is in the middle of flammable material, will not tend to take anything else with it. Yes one has taken a few other vehicles inside a closed parking garage, but it is not just the battery which is flammable in a car.

If you delve into a Tesla battery pack and the security design, you find that it has channels which vent the heat of a runaway reaction down below the battery, it has barriers to stop spread and localise the problem. All of this has been designed to allow the passengers to get out of the vehicle before it goes up and has been successful at doing so. Only when the vehicle has been smashed into something at very high speed and torn apart, does this problem occur. For that I refer you back to a full petrol tank when a vehicle is torn apart.

This is pure fearmongering. Yes it is bloody difficult to stop when it has begun. But so is an unleaded fuel fire if you don't have the correct equipment and with Diesel, even if you do, you need to get at it FAST.

[Workingman]

We do get it - you are a fanboy.

Tesla - good. St Elon - good. SpaceX - good. No other view or criticism allowed.

[Suff]

Not at all. You just re-posted a lot of criticism without researching it. Not up to your standard.

I'm clear on this. Musk I would probably not like. What Musk does, I mostly like. Denying Covid was not a good move of his but I can understand why, especially when the local county in California used it to try and hold his business up when others were not held to the same standard. Stupid move but that's Musk.

I wish I'd done 10% of the things in my life that he has done in his and I still don't think I'll like him.

[Workingman]

I did enough "research" to set straight that the implied 'expert' opinion from the linked post was from a fanboy in Nigeria - an agricultural worker.

I did enough "research" to find the cause of the fire and the action necessary to extinguish it, something missing from the above posts and many of the reports in the press.

I have now looked into "Logs from the vehicle show it was not on. End of story end of news about some rogue AI based driving system smashing into a tree" and found that Texas police have served warrants on Tesla to get to see those supposed logs mentioned only in a tweet.

I have not introduced other unrelated technologies, fuels or disasters to support what I am saying, unlike you.

Oh, hang on, I did, sorry, I mentioned a steering wheel. You know, that round thing in front of the "driver" to let them point the car in the direction they want it to go? Old tech, but it works.

I also looked at the YouTube video. So, if you strap in and drive off in a Tesla and then undo the belt the car stops. A bit like my Nissan Note except that it only give a warning beep, but then I am still driving the car just with no seat belt. However, I can buckle the belt before getting in and drive without being belted in and get no warning; I could just drive with no seat belt and the car would be non the wiser. Could that happen in a Tesla? Could the owner buckle up the belt, get in and sit on the belt then drive off in self-drive mode and later jump to the passenger seat?

If I did similar in the Note I would need a brick on the accelerator or a broom handle to press it down and still need to steer. Genuinely interested.

[Suff]

If you unsnap a seatbelt when on Full Self Driving, where the FSD is actually driving the vehicle, it gives a loud warning sound, checks around itself and then pulls over at the side of the road, stops the vehicle and puts the hazard warning lights on.

The implication being that if, as was claimed, the car was driving on FSD with nobody in the driving seat, the car would not have crashed but would have immediately parked itself off the road with the hazards on. I'd like to have seen your Note do that.

Musk has already answered about AutoPilot (AP). The situation described was equally impossible. AP would disengage if the driver left the seat and the advanced collision avoidance would have stopped the car. If the driver tried to engage it on that road it would not have engaged. So the claim was impossible. Because even if the driver tried to engage it, it would not have engaged.

You ask about the cause of the fire. Well that's pretty obvious, the vehicle was smashed to pieces at very high speed against a very solid object (tree). That warped the structure of the batteries and allowed the anode and the cathode to short, causing a fire. Just like the Samsung Note 7. Remember that? You were not allowed to take them on planes. They went up in flames for no real reason other than their batteries had a fault in them. I have also sent a Li battery up when working on one of my mobile phones. I poked a tiny hole in it by mistake. Fortunately I was able to get it out of the house, flip the battery on the ground and let it burn itself to a crisp with clouds of white smoke.

All of the above is relevant.

So is the fact that Kia had to recall over 1 year of EV vehicles manufactured because plugging them in had caused more than a dozen of them to burst into flames. More than every Tesla burnout. Ever. Fancy a second hand Kia E-Niro? They can't self drive but they can surely burst into flames if the owner didn't reply to the recall.

[Workingman]

Musk has already answered about AutoPilot (AP). The situation described was equally impossible. AP would disengage if the driver left the seat and the advanced collision avoidance would have stopped the car. If the driver tried to engage it on that road it would not have engaged. So the claim was impossible. Because even if the driver tried to engage it, it would not have engaged.

Really? So how come Bhavesh Patel was banned for 18 months and given 100 hours community service for doing it on the M1?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/0 ... ravelling/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ugtARnL6KY

And here's a Tesla video of it in use around town on roads that St Elon says it s not usable on.

https://uk.motor1.com/news/430600/tesla ... t-it-sees/

What the video perfectly shows is that high-tech and drive-stupid cars are a 'solution' to a problem that does not exist. Drivers are doing what all that computing power is doing but they do it instinctively. We are decades away from Level 5 and even when we do get it the poor "driver" is going to have to get themselves washed and dressed, have breakfast and then walk from the front door to the car - poor dears.

[Suff]

Really? So how come Bhavesh Patel was banned for 18 months and given 100 hours community service for doing it on the M1?

AP 1.0. It was rectified later. Now you can't do it. All Tesla vehicles get regular OTA updates which change things. This offense was in May 2017, the conviction was handed out 1 year later. Hardware 2 model S went into production in October 2016 and software to take advantage of it, plus Autopilot re-writes, came out in February and June 2017. Release was always on new vehicles, OTA came later.

Autopilot is now on Version 3 to leverage Hardware 3, which is a step change from hardware 2.5 (40 times faster).

This case you dug up bears no resemblance to the Autopilot currently operating on OTA updated vehicles.

Autopilot V7.1, released in 2015 has the following in the release notes from Tesla.

Autosteer: New Safety Restriction
Autosteer is now restricted on residential roads and roads without a center
divider. When Autosteer is engaged on a restricted road, Model S’s speed will
be limited to the speed limit of the road plus an additional 5 mph (10 km/h).
When entering such a restricted road, Model S will reduce its speed if
necessary and will do so even if you increase the cruise control set speed.

So the vehicle which crashed was on a road without a centre divider, driving at extreme speed, when it crashed. As early as 2015 that was impossible with Autopilot as the vehicle would overrule the driver and slow down.

It is just possible that the owner of this vehicle had either bought one with 1.0 V7 software from 2015 or software which was hacked onto a rebuilt vehicle with OTA disabled. That would allow the driver to leave the seat, enable autosteer and tell the vehicle to exceed the speed at which the software was capable of operating. If that is true (but Tesla says they have the logs which say it is not), then it is hardly Tesla's fault. They have already found and fixed the errors which allowed people to be stupid. They sent out these software updates for free and ensured that every vehicle they could reach was updated with the safest software they have.

As for the final video? I didn't see it driving on city streets, on roads without centre dividers, nor in densely populated residential streets with children playing. Even then, it was operating in a mode which is around 25% of the latest software Tesla is doing on Beta. I have seen similar video's for FSD. It is like night an day, Autopilot is like a 1970's DOS computer compared to FSD as a full blown W10 monster. Yet, even today, Tesla maintains that so long as FSD is beta the driver must be attentive and aware whilst using it. Tesla has been using the driver facing camera to boot people off the Beta for flouting the rules.