from Hacker News

Tesla crash driver posted videos of himself riding without hands on wheel

by benrmatthews on 5/15/21, 9:09 PM with 43 comments

• by hoppyhoppy2 on 5/15/21, 11:44 PM

  See also "Tesla owner who 'drives' from back seat got arrested, then did it again": https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/tesla-owner-jail...

• by simondotau on 5/16/21, 12:52 AM

  Remember 27 days ago when Hacker News was flooded with comments insisting that the underlying problem was the "Autopilot" name? The argument, best as I can tell, is that the name of their cruise control system somehow convinces innocent, everyday consumers into having deadly high speed crashes on short cul-du-sacs.

  Then Consumer Reports published a video showing how to defeat Tesla's multiple safety protections by intentionally misleading the vehicle's driver occupancy sensors. Tesla was blamed for having sensors that couldn't detect intentional misuse.

  Turns out that Occam's Razor holds: this whole saga was nothing more than a moron doing stupid things in a high performance vehicle. It's a shame that so many people had such wildly different assumptions because it happened to be an electric car made by a company whose CEO is an eccentric nerd and twitter troll.

• by mcguire on 5/16/21, 12:10 AM

  "Another man was seriously injured when the electric vehicle hit him as he was helping the truck driver out of the wreck."

• by chmod775 on 5/16/21, 6:24 AM

  > A message seeking comment from his wife was not returned.

  That made me spit out my coffee. And not because I was laughing.

  Journalists have to be one of the most tone-deaf and least sensitive groups of people on this planet. And I thought I was bad.

  If you feel like you have to write an article like that mentioning people by their full names, by all means, fine. But maybe leave a grieving wife the fuck alone - at least for a few months. Find a family member that is a few steps removed if you can't contain yourself.

• by spoonjim on 5/15/21, 11:13 PM

  Thankfully so far these reckless sociopaths have only done self-owns. Tesla is in for a reckoning when an innocent gets killed.

• by metalman on 5/16/21, 12:03 AM

  The driver in all of these fatalities was the same,err,robot and if anyother idivual showed a propensity for running amok and killing people they would lose there licence to drive,have wildly increased insurance premiums and eventualy go to jail and be kept there. What it boils down to is that the tesla robot has been given a kill permit and that this is the thin edge of the automated killing of humans wedge.Think "area denial system"

• by ajross on 5/15/21, 11:52 PM

  Um... "The driver [...] posted social media videos of himself riding in the vehicle without his hands on the wheel or foot on the pedal."

  That's... what autopilot does. What's the allegation here? That he used autopilot correctly and filmed it?

  More to the point, where's the allegation that autopilot was at fault here? The only detail I can find is that he hit an existing overturned vehicle in the middle of the night. That's actually a routine kind of accident for human drivers, who aren't prepared to see stationary objects in the road. Add to that "2:30am" and I think it's pretty clear we'd all view this as a terrible but unavoidable tragedy in any other vehicle.

  Again, what's the actual story here? I know what they want us to think based on the headline and lede. I just don't see that in the text of the article. Someone help me out here.