Elon Musk Denies Autopilot Use In Fatal Tesla Crash Where Police Claim 'No One Was Driving' (thedrive.com) 287
Rei writes: After a Tesla crash in The Woodlands killed two people last Saturday night, news reports were quick to jump to the conclusion that Autopilot (or even FSD) was being used and led to the strange crash, in which investigators reported nobody in the driver's seat, one victim buckled in in the front passenger seat, and the other buckled in behind them. On Twitter, however, Autopilot users were quick to question this account, noting that Autopilot can't be enabled on a road lacking lane lines; the speed and acceleration were far higher than Autopilot allows; and numerous other problems. Now Elon Musk has weighed in with the first official statement since the crash. Responding to a user questioning the reporting, Musk said: "Your research as a private individual is better than professionals @WSJ! Data logs recovered so far show Autopilot was not enabled & this car did not purchase FSD. Moreover, standard Autopilot would require lane lines to turn on, which this street did not have." What actually caused the crash and why nobody was found in the driver's seat remains unclear at this point; analysis of the logs and investigation of the crash site remains ongoing.
Doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
The public has already moved on. The public will only ever remember the "It was on autopilot!" stories, not the truth.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
The public has already moved on. The public will only ever remember the "It was on autopilot!" stories, not the truth.
With two billion humans on the platform representing one of the worlds largest products, why am I not surprised that many others in media have adopted the Zuckerberg "Dumb Fucks" model of success, pimping lies for profit. Perhaps there should be a law against reporting the cause of a crash until the facts have been gathered. Immediately pointing the finger at autopilot to create a viral clickbait reaction is akin to the reporter calling the innocent-until-proven-guilty suspect a "murderer" with nothing more than an anonymous tip as evidence.
The MSM is starting to show their short position more and more being the perpetual perpetrators of death when it comes to Tesla. Yet more evidence if how "unsafe" they are:
"From 2012 – 2020, there has been approximately one Tesla vehicle fire for every 205 million miles traveled. By comparison, data from the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) and U.S. Department of Transportation shows that in the United States there is a vehicle fire for every 19 million miles traveled"
The CEOs of other auto companies would be holding a daily media event by comparison.
Oh, and serious question for Tesla; you're telling me that most cars won't activate a damn air bag when the weight sensor in the seat isn't triggered, but for some reason a Tesla will activate autopilot with no one in the drivers seat, and travel faster than parking lot speed?
I would have figured a weight sensor would have been the first thing that would have pegged Elons bullshit meter. Guess not.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:4, Informative)
The CEOs of other auto companies would be holding a daily media event by comparison.
Tesla doesn't give a penny in advertising. Media(there is apparently no journalism in the US) will spin it negatively.
Re: Doesn't matter (Score:5, Informative)
The "four hour fire" thing turned out to be BS as well [houstonchronicle.com]. The fire chief says that it was under control in 2-3 minutes after first responders arrived; only the occasional pop after 5-10 minutes; and while they were on the s ene for four hours, there was no fire, they were just using "a little bit of water" to make sure the pack was cold. They also did not need to call Tesla to learn how to fight it.
Re: Doesn't matter (Score:5, Informative)
To quote the fire chief:
He also noted:
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It was only not an active fire because they kept cooling it. As the chief said, It was a reaction in the battery pan. I note that you bolded the text right next to that text in an apparent attempt to distract attention away from it, though.
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When was the last time you heard of someone in an accident being covered in gasoline? For there to be fuel inside the vehicle you usually have to have sufficient crash intensity that you're not going to survive the experience anyway.
I wasn't trying to make a judgement between the two, what I'm saying is that claiming there wasn't an ongoing fire is disingenuous.
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Information for the electorate comes from the press, and freedom of the press is critical
And we fund this critical piece of democracy using advertisement dollars.
Internet has cherry-picked the profitable classified ad sections off and left it with high cost news gathering without any serious means of monetizing it.
Please subscribe to your local newspaper and a few national news papers, donate to pbs and other news gatherers. Do it even if you dont agree with the
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Please subscribe to your local newspaper and a few national news papers, donate to pbs and other news gatherers. Do it even if you dont agree with the political leaning of them.
But should I help fund the fraudulent NYT, who as you point out paid a guy to falsify a Tesla test and then rewarded him by promoting him to editor? That seems like a good way to reward a news organization for lying to you.
In fact, since the NYT paywalls, I mostly don't even read them and I never, ever cite them.
We're going to have to find a new way to get news, because the world is changing.
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Once we nourish that news paper to have some steady revenue independent of ad dollars, and their revenue depends on credibility of their news, they will boot the lying cheat out.
Once we reward them for bad behavior, they will do better? That's literally insane.
I'll reward them for doing the right thing, which is to say if they boot out the lying cheats, I'll consider subscribing.
My money is probably safe, though. Fuck the fraudulent NYT.
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Perhaps there should be a law against reporting the cause of a crash until the facts have been gathered.
The media has for a long time used a loophole around this. Instead of stating facts, they ask questions. Because questions aren't libel (or some other bullshit).
Expect to see headlines akin to 'Did Tesla autopilot cause a fatal crash?'
Re: Doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
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I do not know if there are weight sensors in the driver’s seat of a Tesla. The Tesla does know if the seatbelt is fastened, and it will not engage cruise control or auto-steer (aka autopilot) if the driver’s seat belt is not fastened.
Cruise control can be engaged without lane lines and in some cases it can be engaged from a standstill. There is no limit on cruise control speed if auto-steer in not used.
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Cruise control can be engaged without lane lines
Autosteer can also be used without lane lines. It usually can't be engaged on a road without lane lines (though my car occasionally lets me engage it on the line-less road near my house -- there's one section where it's usually willing to engage, briefly) but if it's already engaged and the car drives into an area without lane lines it will continue operating -- and does a good job. When approaching my house from one direction there are no lane lines and I can sometimes engage it in one small section, but w
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Either the driver left the vehicle and fled on foot or it was on autopilot.
Or the cruise control was engaged. The person in the passenger seat could have been steering.
Re: The answer is in TV Police documentaries (Score:5, Insightful)
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Perhaps there should be a law against reporting the cause of a crash until the facts have been gathered.
While not exactly a law, press standards used to work exactly like that.
Then, of course, the press had to compete with online bloggers and "influencers" who were under no such rules, clickbait began to replace headlines and staff at newspapers was cut to save costs.
So yeah, you get what you (don't) pay for.
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It is not like Elon has claimed Autopilot wasn't involved in other crashes, and it turned out, it had disabled itself a second before the crash but did cause the crash..
Oh wait. It is exactly like that.. Twice already. This would make a third.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:4, Interesting)
He now knows?
The short position on this company, is so legendary it practically deserves its own fucking theme song.
I'm pretty sure Elon has endured a lie or two about Tesla from that rabid crowd of truth tellers.
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IBM had its own 'anthem' [ibm.com] from the 1930s to the 1980s or so.
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IBM had its own 'anthem' [ibm.com] from the 1930s to the 1980s or so.
Interesting, but not surprising given the era of fightin'. This practically smacks of Irving Berlin's version of Christmas.
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Right here and now we thankfully pledge sincerest loyalty to the corporation that's the best of all!
Yep, that would fly in the 21st century, especially among young people.
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police were too idiotic/lazy to look for him
Lazy, maybe idiotic not so much. I mean we are talking about a car crash here. The driver isn't a danger to anyone else - his/her reckless driving might be but s/he won't be doing any more of that. We have license plates and vin numbers that in this case were clearly going to be identifiable.
As you say either the person turns them selves in or you can just go wait for them to come home/knock on their door. Seems way easier than chasing them all over creation. Sure someone not the owner might have been dri
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It's because Tesla alpha tests it's software on public roads that other people have to share with their cars. So far they only seem to have killed their own customers, but it's only a matter of time...
There are other issues. Musk promises much and then doesn't deliver. The cars are decent but not quite as wonderful as fans make out. There are plenty of other good EVs out there. 250-300 mile range is really plenty, and for most people it just doesn't make sense to pay for more. On the odd occasions they do
When no one is driving... (Score:2)
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Don't forget to trigger the autopilot, guys!
And don't forget buying it first!
A Locked Room Mystery (Score:4, Insightful)
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Sounds the most likely scenario. Probably bailed out before the crash and luckily for him didn't have any severe injuries then for some reason the car speeded up once he'd done so. Either way I suspect it'll be found these guys were in toxicated in some way.
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For simplicity, it's also possible that various people are lying about the accident.
Re:A Locked Room Mystery (Score:5, Funny)
Scotty picked a bad time to beam him up.
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A classic answer to the "Two dead bodies in a locked bedroom" mystery is "The murderer is hiding under the bed".
Re: A Locked Room Mystery (Score:2)
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Wait and see indeed. The story doesn't add up as is, and we've seen early fog of war reports that are wrong already.
The simplest theory so far is driver went around the corner and crashed and then bailed so as to not go to jail for killing his friends.
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You don't just unbuckle your belt and "dive into the back seat" after "accidentally accelerating". By the time you get into the back seat you'll have traveled several hundred feet.
Re:A Locked Room Mystery (Score:5, Informative)
If the user modified the car to do something it's not supposed to do, then it wasn't really running "tesla autopilot", it was running something else supplied by a third party that may only in part be based on tesla's autopilot function.
If you modify a product and it fails then that's on you, the manufacturer can't be blamed if they never claimed such functionality to be present in the product.
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Another possibility is that Tesla's records are wrong. They have form in that regard, saying cars don't have autopilot when it is enabled. When they notice they often remotely disable it.
Often happens when cars are sold, initially Tesla doesn't realize that the owner has changed but when they do they remotely disable autopilot to try to force the new owner to buy it again.
They also do free trials of autopilot where the owner gets to use it for a limited time.
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...If you modify a product and it fails then that's on you, the manufacturer can't be blamed if they never claimed such functionality to be present in the product.
They better hold on to the modified defense, because Tesla vs. Stupid will be waging in courts for years over the assumptions of "autopilot".
As a result, future Teslas may come with two steering wheels. To ensure redundancy. They call it RAIDIOT-1.
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More likely the car was on autopilot. Tesla's data isn't always accurate, people hack the cars to enable features themselves, and the supposed lock-outs that prevent it being used on unmarked roads are as janky as the rest of the system.
Or maybe it was on autopilot, but then turned itself off leading to the crash. Of course Elon can then claim it's not on during the crash.
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Lawyers are waiting to sue robo car makers. The best defense is a great log of what actually happened.
Re:A Locked Room Mystery (Score:5, Funny)
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Seems pretty unlikely that there was a driver. This mystery driver somehow escaped the crash and ran off, leaving the other two behind. The passengers were injured badly enough to be unable to escape, but the driver wasn't. Pretty far fetched.
The whole situation is pretty far fetched, so it wouldn't be unexpected if it was caused by something far fetched.
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I think the two people inside were murdered. If you look ar the tree, the damage it has doesn't look like damage from a car crash. So I think that the two people inside were tied to their chairs and a lot of flammable stuff was put in the car with them together with an ignition system. The car was then pushed against the tree in some way, the flammable stuff ignited and the murderers went away, leaving the car to burn itself out, including the ropes, the flammable stuff and the two people inside.
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Re:A Locked Room Mystery (Score:5, Interesting)
More likely the car was on autopilot.
More likely the car was on cruise control, and the person in the passenger seat was steering. This scenario is consistent with all of the facts, including Tesla's data. It's also easy to see how a person steering from the passenger seat could lose control going around a curve.
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Says he seatbelt was on so could not have been thrown there.
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There Was A Third Person Driving (Score:3)
They will find him/her/it.
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My only question is this: Does autopilot function while the driver's seat is empty? If it does, then it's possible the car did have autopilot and the records and datalogs are wrong or tampered with. If it doesn't, then there indeed was a third person.
In all honesty a car should not be moving at all if nobody is in direct control, automatically or not.
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My only question is this: Does autopilot function while the driver's seat is empty?
No, of course it doesn't.
That would be ridiculous and your bullshit alarm should have triggered right there.
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Which is why I asked, I've never worked on a Tesla before or even been in one, but I know dead man's switch is a standard for most field machinery. This means someone is fucking lying, someone fled the scene, or the car was tampered. I'm leaning mostly towards tampering.
Hell, who says the passengers were alive before the car crashed?
Re:There Was A Third Person Driving (Score:5, Informative)
No, it does not. You need to be in the driver's seat (or there needs to be enough weight to make the car think you are), you need to apply torque to the steering wheel on a semi-regular basis (not much, and there are ways to get around it) or it shuts off and the car coasts to a stop, and it turns off on its own if it encounters something it's unsure about.
It's a neat feature for making trips on well-lit uncrowded highways less tiring, but it's not magic, and you need to do a fair bit of fuckery to get it to act out of spec.
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No, it does not. You need to be in the driver's seat (or there needs to be enough weight to make the car think you are), you need to apply torque to the steering wheel on a semi-regular basis (not much, and there are ways to get around it) or it shuts off and the car coasts to a stop, and it turns off on its own if it encounters something it's unsure about.
It's a neat feature for making trips on well-lit uncrowded highways less tiring, but it's not magic, and you need to do a fair bit of fuckery to get it to act out of spec.
Really? [youtube.com]
I have no idea if they did some kind of mod, but that's not the only video of Tesla's driving without a driver [youtube.com].
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If the crash was bad enough to kill the remaining occupants then how did the driver escape?
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Come on man. Read a news paper? Watch COPS? The driver almost always survives to run away!
Beta testing (Score:2, Insightful)
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Set the cruise control on your car. Let go of the wheel. See how long before you run into something.
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It's amazing (and scary) that they allow beta testing on real roads.
That is not as scary as allowing human drivers on the road.
Some (OK, lots of) human drivers, yes. Driving tests should be really really hard => uncongested roads and less accidents :-)
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Autopilot can be used on roads without marking. (Score:2, Interesting)
Clearly it can. Here is a video from a UK Telsa owner enabling Autopilot on road with no markings. see https://youtu.be/QqlVbFM8E5w?t... [youtu.be]
Scarily it then drifts over to the right edge. i.e. the wrong side of the road in the UK.
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We don't need more people like that stupid Apple engineer who got killed trying to prove a point instead of just stop using it and report the failure.
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That's FSB, not standard autopilot (Score:5, Insightful)
Even the summary says that standard autopilot is the one that cannot be used on roads without marking and that the car has not purchased Full Self Driving (implying that FSB is the one that would work). And just the title of your linked video clearly says it is about FSB (and watching the video, it's clear that with FSB the car doesn't really want to drive on that tiny road...). I assume you can read English, why the hate?
I mean, I wouldn't trust FSB personally (probably because I am a software engineer), but I don't like blatant misinformation.
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Even the summary says that standard autopilot is the one that cannot be used on roads without marking and that the car has not purchased Full Self Driving (implying that FSB is the one that would work). And just the title of your linked video clearly says it is about FSB (and watching the video, it's clear that with FSB the car doesn't really want to drive on that tiny road...). I assume you can read English, why the hate?
I mean, I wouldn't trust FSB personally (probably because I am a software engineer), but I don't like blatant misinformation.
If by FSB you mean Full Self-Drive Beta then you are wrong the guy is using Autopilot. The title is click-baity, but he is testing improvements to Autopilot in the UK since the release of FSD beta in the USA.
We don't have FSD in the UK probably due to the fact we drive on the 'wrong' side of the road.
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So the person that owned the car didn't purchase it? SO next question is was the car NEW or did they by it second hand?
Why do you jump straight to bullshit conpsiracies rather than apply a bit of basic Occam's razor? You look like a bit of an idiot.
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This is pretty normal for a road in a rural community in the UK. It is not a One Way road, so it matters which side you are driving.
There are enough room for 2 cars to pass.
I'm not surprised a Tesla would get confused. Not exactly the worlds largest two "lane" road.
So when you are driving down a road your are unsure is a one way road do you drift to the wrong side?
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This is pretty normal for a road in a rural community in the UK.
True, most of the roads around me are similar, and even where there are supposed to be markings they are very patchy, with perhaps just a discoloured cat's eye now and then.
SD should be confined to motorways, if allowed at all, until the tech is much better, if ever.
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At the timestamp I linked to, he is driving through a village with no road makings. Initially it won't allow start, but then does see 18:30 into the video.
Elon! (Score:2)
You're not seeing the Big Picture here, dude. In the Age of Covid, three and a half little words:
MOBILE. DRIVE-IN. THEATRES.
Thank you, thank you. I'll take my commission in Telsacoin.
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Of course, we'll have to widen the interstates, but you can afford it can't you?
Elon talk bullshit ? (Score:2)
Software (Score:3, Funny)
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Also find a road without lane lines to hide.
What privacy? (Score:4, Insightful)
Am I the only one that is concerned that Musk tweets openly about what was logged about the operation of the car when it was used, and purchase choices made by the buyer? In my book that is a severe privacy invasion.
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You're not the only one.
From the article it's not clear to me whether real-time data is logged within the car itself, or the data is also available in the cloud. Logging stuff within the car itself is completely fine (and may be useful when reconstructing accidents), but if real-time data is transmitted to the cloud that will be a huge issue. (And a very good reason for me to not buy a Tesla as long as that's a concern.) Not because that information wouldn't be useful in this specific case, but because I do
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This has been common knowledge for almost a decade: https://www.forbes.com/sites/joannmuller/2013/02/14/teslas-gotcha-blog-catches-new-york-times-reporter-driving-in-circles/?sh=4b71d58dfe73
Top Gear learned the hard way too even earlier. I imagine it's in the TOS when you first take possession of your new Tesla and I imagine that most Tesla owners don't care as this data likely aids in future improvements and features much like the OS on your Apple or Android phones do.
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There's also the fact that Musk has learned the necessity of this kind of aggressive setting-the-record-straight behavior the hard way. Back in the day Top Gear decided to downright fictionalize their review of the original Roadst
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It is 7 years since John Mendacity Broder drove a Tesla around the super charger waiting for the battery to die so that he can report Tesla runs out of battery. He did not k
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it is common knowledge Tesla can pull the car even log remotely. It probably does not have the bandwidth to collect it from all the cars all the time.
There's only half a million cars. A basic update with position and a little bit of information on current state is pretty small. Think coordinates and a flag field. Further, vehicles behaving in an interesting manner could report more often, so e.g. when your speed goes up your reporting rate goes up. Or, you know, when a collision is detected, obviously.
I would not be surprised to learn that every Tesla is reporting continually, say once per five minutes when parked, once per minute when in motion, and the
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Teslas are spyware on wheels.
What's really fascinating is that if he isn't lying then apparently the car sent this telemetry to Tesla before it was destroyed by fire. Maybe they have some code that sends telemetry when an accident is detected.
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To clarify:
I'm not protesting the logging and uploading of telemetry - while I dislike it, I guess you sign off on that when you buy the stuff.
What I find troublesome is someone publishing this data, or distilled parts thereof, to the public.
Corporate talk (Score:3)
Let me translate this corporate talk:
"Data logs recovered so far"
-> We have very little data recovered
"don't show that the company's Autopilot driver-assist software was enabled"
-> The autopilot was disengaged seconds before the crash so technically it wasn't active in the crash.
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Let me translate this corporate talk:
"Data logs recovered so far"
-> We have very little data recovered
"don't show that the company's Autopilot driver-assist software was enabled"
-> The autopilot was disengaged seconds before the crash so technically it wasn't active in the crash.
You missed one:
"There was nobody in the drivers seat."
-> Somebody was obviously fucking around yet somehow the car is to blame?
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"In the real world we have this thing called conservation of momentum. You cannot be thrown backwards in a head on collision no matter what brand of car."
Clearly then the moving tree struck the stationary car :-)
Who Started the Lies? (Score:3)
Can the chain of reporting be reverse engineered to determine who started this large cluster of lies?
Even if you don't believe Elon, the fire chief ought to be more credible than the average reporter. Did the WSJ get punked by shorts? Is the staff writer a short? Somebody got punked or engaged in fantasy rather than journalism - who and when are important.
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Can the chain of reporting be reverse engineered to determine who started this large cluster of lies?
which cluster of lies?
If autopilot was on before the crash, but shut off between getting in the back seat and the collision, then musk is technically accurate while also being misleading. We don't know the full details yet. Who's the liar here? Nobody knows yet.
The battery pack had to be continuously cooled or it would have re-ignited; the fire chief said there was a reaction in the battery pan and not a fire, which means there was a reaction in the battery pan which was controlled by their continual applic
Occams razor (Score:3, Insightful)
One of only three possible explanations:
1) The vehicle was on autopilot with no backup driver when it ran off the road and struck a tree. Both passengers were killed on impact and/or were trapped in the vehicle and burned alive. Considering the restraints were in place, dead on impact the likeliest of the two.
2) This was a double homicide, and the crash and fire were forensic countermeasures to cover up two already dead suspects. A non guilty third party driver makes less sense as no one had appeared at a hospital with burns nor made any attempt to remove the two victims from a burning vehicle before fleeing the scene
3) the driver crashes the car and then positioned himself into the passenger seat before buckling himself back into the passenger seat before succumbing to the most painful method of death imaginable.
In gonna stick with #1 and investigate the chance of #2. Musks suggestion that 3 is even a remote possibility is by far the most absurd to date.
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One of only three possible explanations:
Those are not the only three.
4) The vehicle was on cruise control and the front passenger seat was steering and lost control going around a curve and struck a tree. Both passengers were killed on impact and/or were trapped in the vehicle and burned alive. Considering the restraints were in place, dead on impact the likeliest of the two.
This is also consistent with Musk's statement that Autopilot was not engaged.
Confusing (Score:2)
Hold my beer? (Score:3)
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These can be easily forged. Auto-pilot does not check after it is enabled, so you can climb out of the drivers seat once it is going, you can buy magnetic "hands" that fool the steering sensor etc.