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WBTV, CBS television affiliate for Charlotte, NC reports
Tesla Motors says the Model S sedan involved in a fatal crash in the Netherlands wasn't operating in the company's semi-autonomous Autopilot mode and was going more than 96 miles per hour when it crashed.
The 53-year-old driver of the electric sedan died [September 6] when his car smashed into a tree in the central Dutch town of Baarn and burst into flames, police and firefighters said. Police are investigating the cause of the early morning accident in the town 40 kilometers (25 miles) southeast of Amsterdam.
Tesla said the car's logs show Autopilot wasn't engaged at any time during the man's trip, and that he was driving at more than 155 kilometers per hour, or 96 mph. The speed is consistent with the damage the car sustained from hitting the tree, the company said. Tesla sent representatives to the scene of the accident.
Electrek adds
The driver was reportedly dead by the time the firefighters were on the scene.
[...] The fire was difficult to extinguish according to the firefighters. They reportedly didn't know how to approach the vehicle without being electrocuted--leaving the body of the driver in the vehicle.
[...] Apparently, the problem wasn't due to a lack of knowledge on how to handle a crashed electric vehicle, but because of the state of the wreckage. [...] "This car is completely destroyed, hampering the recovery. In this situation, you never know what can happen."
Some of the battery modules reportedly fell out of the battery pack after the crash and subsequent fire.
[Eds Comment: The speed limit on the road was 90 kph / 56 mph. The vehicle is assessed to have been travelling at 154 kph/ 96 mph
See also: https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=15392&cid=398721]
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 08 2016, @09:14PM
There's ongoing tension between the indigenous inhabitants of the Netherlands and those that by culture and religion shall be forever outsiders, yet neither of the two links has mentioned a whisper of the demographic origins of this suicidal driver. It is a simple matter of history that monoethnic states are more peaceful internally than mixed ones, yet the Western world has sold out their birthrights to depress wages and avoid reforming the kleptocratic bureaucracies that choke them.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 08 2016, @10:06PM
I'm not surprised I'm getting moderated in every direction for that post.
Shouldn't we expect journalists to report on uncomfortable facts, rather than reveal their own biases by selectively hiding truths that would be inconvenient to their worldview? Or to put it another way, if this was a native European would they hesitate to publish details about him? If the terrorist were a Nazi they'd be tripping over themselves to point it out. An unusual sense of paternalist racist-based morality, indeed.