Tesla crash Mountain View California

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A Model X crashed and caught fire locally on the highway here yesterday. Unfortunately, the driver died.

https://patch.com/california/mountainview/fiery-crash-blocks-highway-101-mountain-view

On the tv news last night, it was said that police wouldn't allow the car to be moved until Tesla engineers had inspected the vehicle and determined whether it was safe to do so, and the battery voltage need to be dropped first.

http://www.ktvu.com/news/fatal-car-crash-involving-tesla-reveals-electric-car-cleanup-related-challenges

It raises the issue for how emergency personnel handle crashed electric cars, where you don't have Tesla (or other manfacturers') engineers just down the road
 
I forwarded that second KTVU article to my local FD in case they haven't fully developed their standard incident response.
 
Victims family now says the owner had complained about the Tesla autopilot veering toward the same barrier in the past. Shop couldn't duplicate the error. Being an engineer, I guess he couldn't keep from messing with it on the road.

http://abc7news.com/automotive/i-team-exclusive-victim-who-died-in-tesla-crash-had-complained-about-auto-pilot/3275600/
 
He trusted technology too much. The poor guy.
 
About this veering bit as mentioned before.
If a driver takes control of the vehicle, autopilot should be off no matter what.

If the sensors are wonky, it should be 100% manual control. I dont think autopilot should over ride manual operation.
 
e-beach said:
If he complained that the auto pilot malfunctioned at that spot repeatedly then he used it many times at that spot. Not such a big assumption that he was using it his last time.
It would be just even safer to assume that since it malfunctioned there, he no longer used it in that area.

It would be unlikely that he noted such a malfunction several times, then not only continued to use the autopilot there but also ignored the car's trajectory in that location.

But we may never know since the storage media was destroyed in the crash.
 
markz said:
If a driver takes control of the vehicle, autopilot should be off no matter what.
It is. If you do more than nudge the steering wheel the autopilot disconnects. (Also if you touch the brake.)
I dont think autopilot should over ride manual operation.
It doesn't.
 
billvon said:
......
It would be just even safer to assume that since it malfunctioned there, he no longer used it in that area.

It would be unlikely that he noted such a malfunction several times, then not only continued to use the autopilot there but also ignored the car's trajectory in that location......

Did you watch the video link that I posted?
 
From e-beach's link, statement from Tesla:

In the moments before the collision, which occurred at 9:27 a.m. on Friday, March 23rd, Autopilot was engaged with the adaptive cruise control follow-distance set to minimum. The driver had received several visual and one audible hands-on warning earlier in the drive and the driver's hands were not detected on the wheel for six seconds prior to the collision. The driver had about five seconds and 150 meters of unobstructed view of the concrete divider with the crushed crash attenuator, but the vehicle logs show that no action was taken.
 
I watched allot of the news coverage about that crash for a number of days afterward.

There are a number of key points that were brought up by other people who have experience with auto pilot usage on that paticular section of road, also about the crash barrier.

1) An engineer familiar with using a car with auto pilot and that section of highway said " That section of Highway is very confusing to a auto pilot system , the lanes go off at unusual angles and are not clearly seen "
( still do not know if he was using the auto pilot system or not but in any case the main point here is that his car was not the only one doing that on that section of highway )

2) Someone went back to a google map view of that section of highway and saw that the collision barrier that he ran into was not fixed from a recent crash that damaged about 90% of it. The collision barrier was mostly gone with just a small apx 3-4 foot section just before the concrete barrier that he drove head on into . so there was nearly ... No protection from the barrier so a nearly head on collision with a concrete divider. which would have killed most anyone in any type of vehicle at that speed .

3) He did not die from the fire of the batteries , he died upon impact , and he was carried out of the car ,
the batteries went into thermal runaway several minutes latter.

From looking at the wreckage of the car I was surprised at the damage with such a large car even without being an electric car . very surprised , I would have thought Tesla's would not be damaged to such an extent. I have seen the aftermath of Mercedes , and Corvette car crashes and they looked much better intact, and the drivers walked away or lived .

For nearly 10 years now I have wanted a Tesla Car, ( Once I win hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars with the lottery )
But
Not any longer. That car should not have sustained that much damage to the body of the car.
Tesla really needs to go back to the design stage and design a car like a Mercedes or Corvette.
 
Interesting assertion that if the driver had been in a merc (any model?!) or Corvette he would have "walked away", when you don't even know the basics of the Model X crash. Do you know how fast he was going? Whether what you see in the media of the car with it's front end missing is "as crashed" or after the firefighters have put parts away to allow the technicians to access the batteries? Do you know of a similar Corvette crash?
 
I met someone who was in a head on - high speed crash on the Autobahn in his Mercedes and he was standing there a few months latter ... Alive , talking to me. He said that the other car he had before the Mercedes would not have had the same results.
Mercedes Benz cars have in the design crumple zones in the frame and body work , and I have seen pictures of them in high speed crashes where there were little / smaller level of injuries to the occupants. And the examples were high speed crashes.


The Tesla was traveling in Rush Hour Traffic, and at that time of day in that location it was going well under 50 mph, most likely around 35 mph or less, as at that time of day the speed can get as low as 10-15 mph and rarely gets to even 35 mph. ( I have driven that Highway and the others here in the Bay Area for many years )

I have seen pictures of high speed crashes of Corvette's, I read an article some years ago that showed pictures and wrote about how the Corvette at the time had far fewer injuries and/or death than most every other car on the road . The reason the Corvette was designed with a driver/passenger roll cage, not the heavy ones you see in Nascar Racing, but designed into the frame so to most people they do not even know it is there.
Add to that the fact that with a fiberglass body, when an impact does occur the force is absorbed much more by the Corvette's body than most other cars.
The picture I remember showed the Corvette much more destroyed than that Tesla ... and the Driver Walked Away !
Corvette driver walked away and the Tesla driver Died, ... the Corvette crash was over twice the speed of the Tesla perhaps even 3 times or more the speed since the main point of the article was about very high speed crashes and the Corvette Car. This was Not the only Corvette crash recorded with the same results by the way.
 
It depends a great deal what the details of the crash are how the vehicle responds. Do we have any other crash test information about the Tesla compared to Mercedes, etc to judge if there is a difference in crashworthiness? Standardized testing will tell more about comparative crashworthiness than different random road situations.

A damaged crash barrier may be a very different situation, and not a good example to draw conclusions from.

Even in heavy traffic, speeds often vary from 0 to full speed, so assumptions about speed can be quite wrong.

Almost any vehicle today is designed with crash crumple zones in mind, it is standard procedure these days and required to pass crash testing.
 
Please, 35mph into a partially-collapsed barrier is approximately within the limits of official crash testing, which both the Model S and X have excelled at. This was no ordinary crash.

How do you get a head-on collision on an Autobahn? They have a central barrier separating opposing traffic.

There are plenty of anecdotes of people walking away from car crashes at ~100mph but they are a minority outcome and come down to sheer luck more than anything else.
 
Back when I was in Germany years ago there were plenty of sections of the Autobahn that had only grass / land between the two different directions.
Going back deeper into my memory, when living there I saw news reports and pictures of people on the Autobahn crashing at high speeds with injuries but no death , other crashes where there was death.

And the person I talk about who was talking to me a few months after getting into a crash, his crash where it was divided , but near the entrance of a tunnel he hit another vehicle but going fast enough to then proceed to crash right into the side of the tunnel at the entrance , thereby crashing right into Rock . Head on into a Rock Hillside .

The point is , Crashes in other cars at higher speeds and no death, but Tesla car crash at low speed and death.

When looking at the many news reports of the Tesla crash I questioned if the damage to the top front of the half of it was from the crash or from the Fire Department cutting it open to get out the driver.
In the news reports other people stopped immediately and pulled the driver out of the car long before the Fire Department got there.
So that answers one question, but leaves another, Did the Fire Department cut open the car in order to get to the batteries ? Which would make the crash look worse than, and make the crash look like it took place at a higher speed than what is the usual low speed in that area at that time of day ??

In any case , in such a low speed ( low speed for a highway ) crash the driver should not have died immediately upon impact. Although just a few weeks earlier I saw on the news the aftermath of a deadly crash involving one of those Very small Italian cars ( Fiat ) and a small tree. it only crumpled a very small part of the front right side of that little Fiat, but the driver died upon impact . Taking everything into account I am still surprised the Tesla driver died immediately .
 
Do we know it was 35 mph? Or is that an unsubstantiated assumption?

Crashing into a narrow chunk of end-on concrete is not similar to a crash test barrier.

I don't know, but it would seem that some people are ready to reach conclusions without data.

I've seen cars penetrated to the firewall by a simple telephone pole. Whenever the crash doesn't fit the test models things can go very differently than planned.
 
It was a battery fire.

Also ,the speculation is that the driver died upon impact. The interchange safety barrier he hit was fully collapsed and offered no energy absorbing dispersion. No indication yet as to if or if not he was wearing a seat-belt.

As for the pictures, it looks like the Tesla was cut in half by the fire department before the car was photographed.

No hands on the wheel indicates that he put too much trust into technology. The poor guy.
 
I saw the car on the TV news, it was not good. But dunno if it was fire dept ripping the pillars/roof back, but I could clearly see no front seats.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Tesla+crash+tv+news+mountain+view&t=ffab&atb=v77-1&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images&nexp=b&iai=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.latimes.com%2Fresizer%2Fiizrod41hauKTOUjnBZKF5aY3dQ%3D%2F1400x0%2Farc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-tronc.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2F2EYLQ4ABPJDJNAJ6VOHWSSVCYE.jpg

Thats a clear shot, tv news had an helicopter shot from the rear, so it wasnt that clear. Hope he died on impact, fire deaths are a horrible way to die.
 
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