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Tesla fatal crash: 'autopilot' mode sped up car before driver killed, report finds
A Tesla driving in "autopilot" mode crashed in March when the vehicle sped up and steered into a concrete barrier, according to a new report on the fatal collision, raising fresh concerns about Elon Musk's technology.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said that four seconds before the 23 March crash on a highway in Silicon Valley, which killed Walter Huang, 38, the car stopped following the path of a vehicle in front of it. Three seconds before the impact, it sped up from 62mph to 70.8mph, and the car did not brake or steer away, the NTSB said.
[...] The NTSB report [...] has once again raised serious safety questions about the limits and performance of the autopilot technology, which is meant to assist drivers and has faced growing scrutiny from experts and regulators. Mark Fong, an attorney for Huang's family, also said the report appeared to "contradict Tesla's characterization" of the collision.
The NTSB press release includes this link to the preliminary report, for anyone inclined to read the slightly longer version of events.
The Mountain View Fire Department applied about 200 gallons of water and foam to extinguish the post-crash fire. The battery reignited five days after the crash in an impound lot and was extinguished by the San Mateo Fire Department.
Layoffs at Tesla
Tesla Lays Off 9 Percent Of Workforce
Tesla will lay off about 3,500 workers in an effort to boost profitability, CEO Elon Musk wrote in a company email.
"What drives us is our mission to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable, clean energy, but we will never achieve that mission unless we eventually demonstrate that we can be sustainably profitable," Musk wrote.
Musk conceded that Tesla has not made an annual profit in 15 years. The company posted its largest quarterly loss, of more than $700 million, earlier this year.
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(Score: 2, Disagree) by VLM on Thursday June 14 2018, @10:10PM
Whats not discussed is the massive PR shift from "I'm never gonna buy a Tesla because I don't care if it has 25 mile range or 250 mile range, unless I can drive 26 or 251 miles I'll never buy an electric car" aka the whole psychological dysfunction of range anxiety, into a totally separate and PR manageable problem of "Well theres a minor software bug that crashes the car somewhat less often than human drivers" which is certainly easy to push sales thru.
Yup, I love recreational conspiracy theories and I'm proposing that crashing and killing a dozen people or so is the cheapest PR move to get people to ignore the "electric car" aspect in favor of "its dangerous but safer than human drivers" aspect. Hell, send a software "upgrade" next week that disables the killer self driving feature entirely, and you have a fast as hell electric car... I imagine sales go thru the roof once the buggy software is disabled.
I mean, its not entirely insane to propose a conspiracy theory like this. Remember the engineering lessons of "unsafe at any speed" where a $10 part was left out of the suspension of a car because it was cheaper to pay off the dead driver's family than to fix the suspension? That wasn't a crazy conspiracy theory, that was General Motors management. So I'm about 50:50 serious vs recreational about this particular conspiracy theory.
I would not be surprised if centuries of experience of financial market manipulation is going on, too. Flip a bit in the software, value of the company and stock tanks, buy a shitload, flip the bit back, price doubles, ten-tuples, hundred-tuples in a couple years, profit....