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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: 2) by theluggage on Friday September 09 2016, @10:22AM
Tesla is held accountable to a standard unreasonably above and beyond everyone else. The autopilot issues are just the latest thing.
Tesla also make extraordinary claims for their vehicles - and probably benefit from "no such thing as bad publicity". Now, don't get me wrong, I have huge respect for what Tesla have achieved in terms of advancing the cause of EVs and would love to have one - if only I fitted the profile of people for whom they made sense. I don't - low annual mileage but with occasional (sometimes short notice) long trips - and yes, I have carefully looked into the logistics: they don't work for me, at least, not well enough to justify the premium cost of an EV. However, I can see that, for others, they hit the sweet spot.
So, yeah, Telsa have stuck their head up, and its going to get shot at. Welcome to Earth. However, they've got their work cut out solving the problems with EVs so I think they've been rather foolish opening up a second front with Autopilot. Sure, they should be researching autonomous cars, but actually rolling out "hands off" tech regular customers is way premature. Firstly, as you point out, they're trying to do it "on the cheap" without Lidar (whereas what needs to happen is for someone to invest in mass-production of Lidar kit the way Tesla have been investing in batteries) and secondly, self-driving is absolutely going to be held to unreasonably high safety standards, and won't be ready for public use until this is proven and the legal situation established. Personally, I'm not operating a self-drive vehicle until the manufacturer accepts liability for accidents.
(Actually, what probably needs to happen is that insurers should stop trying to assign fault: your car gets bent, hits a pedestrian, your passenger gets injured - your insurer pays: the bill is going to end up with some insurance company anyhow and what goes around comes around. Good news is: then, when you get rear-ended, maybe your insurer won't sell your details to lawyers and ripoff replacement car services or force you to use their nominated repair shop...)