Philadelphia Woman Gives Birth in Front Seat of Tesla on Autopilot (theguardian.com) 80
A Philadelphia mother has given birth to what is believed to be the world's first Tesla baby: an infant delivered in the front seat of an electric smart car while it was driving on autopilot. From a report: The remarkable delivery, reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer, took place in September while Yiran Sherry, 33, and her husband Keating Sherry, 34, were taking their three-year-old son Rafa to pre-school. Yiran Sherry's waters broke while the family was stuck in traffic. With contractions increasing rapidly and traffic barely moving, the couple realized they were not going to make it in time.
Keating Sherry placed the vehicle on autopilot after setting the navigation system to the hospital, 20 minutes away in the western suburb of Paoli. He said he laid one hand gently on the car's steering wheel as he attended to his wife. "She was squeezing my hand to the point where I thought she was going to shatter it," Keating Sherry told the Inquirer. "I was [saying] 'Yiran, OK, focus on your breathing.' That was advice to myself, as well. My adrenaline was pumping." Yiran Sherry said the decision over whether to try to wait to give birth until they reached the hospital was an agonising one. However, she said, she kept glancing at their estimated arrival time and saw it was barely moving.
Keating Sherry placed the vehicle on autopilot after setting the navigation system to the hospital, 20 minutes away in the western suburb of Paoli. He said he laid one hand gently on the car's steering wheel as he attended to his wife. "She was squeezing my hand to the point where I thought she was going to shatter it," Keating Sherry told the Inquirer. "I was [saying] 'Yiran, OK, focus on your breathing.' That was advice to myself, as well. My adrenaline was pumping." Yiran Sherry said the decision over whether to try to wait to give birth until they reached the hospital was an agonising one. However, she said, she kept glancing at their estimated arrival time and saw it was barely moving.
Time to cue the (Score:1, Offtopic)
Lauren Boebert jokes. [vanityfair.com]
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Slamming the breaks to speed child delivery isn't good?
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1G? That's nothing! Applying the brakes can give up to 8G:
https://www.thedrive.com/accel... [thedrive.com]
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That's why they ride in a pickup truck. On a potholed road.
Musk should pay for the kid's college (Score:2, Interesting)
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Musk should give the kid a Tesla on their 16th birthday, because there's no way the batteries in that car will still be good in 16 years.
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Modern lithium ion batteries will have a lifespan around 2,000 cycles, which would translate to 400,000 miles if the car’s average range is around 200 miles. I think most people put around 15,000 miles a year on their car, which would translate to a 25 year lifespan. Still most people buying new cars won’t be driving them after 16 years. My current car is 10 years old, I bought it new, and it has almost 200,000 miles on it. I don’t think it’s going to last another 6 years without som
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Most batteries die after ~10 years no matter if you use them or not.
It very much depends on the type of battery. I've actually used a 30-year old dry cell battery and it worked, although not for more than an hour or so, admittedly.
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Then everyone would start birthing children in Telsas :)
Re:The guy should be in prison (Score:5, Interesting)
The road was a parking lot.
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It's one thing to not read the article, but is it too much to ask for people to even read the fucking summary?
The road was a parking lot.
Does not matter.
Pull off the road, call emergency services.
The end.
I'm guessing you've never been on a road with more than 2 lanes in either direction. Try sitting in the middle of an 8-10 lane monstrosity like in Dallas where your next merge begins in the middle lane and you have to immediately exit to the right following (happens a lot more than you think). If she were on a road such as this (which is entirely likely from the sound of it), there's absolutely no way to "Pull off the road, call emergency services" as there's no way to merge when the road is a parking lot.
jail is good as that will cover childbirth for $0 (Score:2)
jail is good as that will cover childbirth for $0
Re:The guy should be in prison (Score:4, Insightful)
How is setting the car in auto pilot a better idea than pulling over and calling 911?
Calling 911 would take twice as long since an ambulance would need to drive there and back instead of just there.
Childbirth is not a life-threatening emergency. Hundreds of millions of women give birth every year with no medical assistance.
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Re:The guy should be in prison (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah yes, the good old, pre-modern medicine, no hospital days from centuries long ago. When 1 in 100 women died giving birth, and 40% of children died before they were 5.
You're quite the romantic.
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The women did not die "giving birth".
They died after birth to fever. Because emerging doctors cut up dead bodies and did not know/think about disinfecting before helping in giving birth. BTW: that happened during the end of the middle ages. In more ancient times death rate was more or less the same as now. See below.
and 40% of children died before they were 5. ...
Another stupid myth
You're quite the romantic.
And you have quite idiotic ideas about history.
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Right. By the 1800s with doctor visits, most of this was cut out. If there were complications in the pregnancy they can be adequately resolved via the hospital before coming to term with a few exceptions. Likewise, aftercare and spending a few days in the hospital is still possible even if giving birth under these circumstances and is likely what was done. This full-term care is what is reducing all that death, not physically being present for birth, as that part is generally the body doing its thing. This
Re:The guy should be in prison (Score:4, Funny)
I will bet that your average Tesla driver considers himself far more intelligent and qualified than any medical professional. Just ask him.
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I will bet that your average Tesla driver considers himself far more intelligent and qualified than any medical professional.
Blah, that's a low bar to clear. Your average Trump supporter feels the same way.
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Of course. They're just like vegans. You don't need to ask, they'll tell you.
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Just maybe the driver was intelligent enough to call the professionals *and* use the technology at his disposal to expedite arrival at the hospital (eg: by moving closer to the hospital where the emergency services are quite likely departing form in the first place).
Maybe some of the Tesla Haters are extrapolating from assumptions? Like that's not ever happened before. Ah
Re: The guy should be in prison (Score:2)
Actually, they are not. Either everything goes according to plan, in which case they're not needed and the mother is most qualified. Or something is off, in which case you need specialized personnel and equipment, an ambulance ER worker won't know enough.
Source: I'm a father of two, having been present at birth, when something did (mildly) go sideways.
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Why, the ER medics are far more qualified to give birth in an ambulance than a layman in the front of a tesla. And the ambulance will be given preference on the road to get them to the car faster than the car can get to the hospital. It was stupid what they did.
The ambulance would still need to deal with the parking lot of a road they were on. Giving preference to an emergency vehicle doesn't work if nobody is able to move at all. One car in the emergency lane and that puts an ambulance in the exact same predicament as everyone else on the road.
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Just wondering, how many births you attended personally? In all (more than one, thank you Lord) that I did, immediate professional intervention was required. In one case an emergency caesarean section was performed. I could not have helped my wife, no matter how I try. Thanks to professional care during childbirth, all of my family are fine.
Now, a bit of simple logic: an ambulance called for a birth (at least in my country), is dispatched with all required equipment and professionals. The ambulane nee
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In gridlock, an ambulance will move much faster than a non-emergency services car. It can use the hard shoulder, people will move aside for it, etc.
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Calling 911 would take twice as long since an ambulance would need to drive there and back instead of just there.
I've been to China, I've seen how zero people give way to ambulances with an active siren running. So I get it why a guy called "ShanghaiBill" may think that he can get to a hospital faster than an ambulance while stuck in traffic.
You're an idiot. It wouldn't be a problem if you kept your mouth shut but you seem to spread idiocy like a virus.
Childbirth is not a life-threatening emergency.
And that thinking is precisely why America has the dubious ranking of #1 in infant mortality. A rate double that of the Netherlands which is the home birth capital of t
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And that thinking is precisely why America has the dubious ranking of #1 in infant mortality. A rate double that of the Netherlands which is the home birth capital of the world, and a place where even the Dutch realise that even when not in hospital you still get professional assistance. Ironically you only care about life while it's in the womb, clearly as soon as the water broke you don't give a flying fuck about bubba or mommy.
This may more have to do with the fact that giving birth to a baby (and all the pre-natal checkups) are quite expensive in the US (vs. most of the rest of the world) and thus poor people may skip those.
AFAIK infant mortality is a bit more complex than just X number of babies/mothers not making it through the first year.
There are many variables a society may choose to adjust (or not).
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Of course there are many variables, and many of them are contributing factors as to why an American would try to drive themselves to hospital while giving birth in the car rather than ... calling an Ambulance. In America giving birth is considered a considerable expense, even before you get a bill from an ambulance.
It has the rest of the world scratching their heads. I wouldn't think twice about calling an ambulance in this situation, and an ambulance wouldn't think twice about showing up an dragging the ot
Re: The guy should be in prison (Score:4, Informative)
Hundreds of millions of women give birth every year with no medical assistance.
About 85-90% of births go well by themselves, just as nature intended. About 5-10% develop mild complications that may or may not be life threatening. And about 1-3% develop complications which would result in death of mother, child, or both, without advanced medical assistance.
So giving birth is actually more deadly than Covid.
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You did not even read the summary?
Rightfully modded as flaimbait.
News at 11 (Score:5, Interesting)
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This is what is scary about the new tech. Now we are going to have a Tik Tok challenge of who can have a baby while driving.
Yea, those were already pretty popular. Now what would be cool is we can have some 9 month follow up videos.
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Probably not even the first "cruise control with lane-keeping" baby born to idiots who didn't pull over.
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Also, sex! Or maybe that already happened?
I bet the (Score:1)
autopilot also knocked her up. [salon.com]
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They don't call it a "cockpit" for nothin'.
I mean (Score:3)
While I'm glad everything worked out, wouldn't it have been a much safer thing to do to just put the car in park and then deal with the baby? I can only speak for myself, but I think if I found out the reason the car in front of me wasn't moving was because a woman was having a baby, I'd be incline to let it slide.
Re:I mean (Score:4, Informative)
The car was moving though, in very slow conditions, conditions where auto-pilot is probably the most well suited for. I agree I would let it slide, but the usage of the system here seems hardly an significant risk. Assuming the driver doesn't freak and slam the accelerator.
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I don't know which is worse; how stupid your comment is, or that you don't pronounce the s in significant.
You should probably be placed in a safe, padded room, for a long long time. To protect the children.
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And to the poster's original point, slamming on the accelerator - if forward collision avoidance is activated on the car (and it is on by default), the car wouldn't jump forward like a 70s muscle car would.
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I thought about that after the post. Even in that situation, this car would likely reduce the risk/danger.
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Just illustrates how useless the Tesla attention monitoring is. The guy only needed one hand on the wheel, with his full attention being on his wife.
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And you jump to the assumption that he wasn't paying any attention to the road?
Without autopilot his only option would have been to pull over and stop in a horrible environment and wait for the professionals to battle the whole route to him (or, more likely, triage the case from a distance and just make him wait till the traffic cleared).
He'
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Park the car? Why not use the voice activated features of the Tesla to... I don't know... call and ambulance? Or does America carry its insanely high infant mortality rate and birth complication rate like a badge of honour?
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The reason for that was due to the way people abused the ambulance system.
People used ambulances instead of driving to save money for a cab and to jump in front of the line in the ER. It was a real problem cost-wise and effected the availability of ambulances.
ER claims also get denied if the insurance decides that the ER wasn't the appropriate setting for care (people also abuse ERs for routine stuff inside of going to clinics or their PCP.) This is based on how the hospital codes the claim, though, not o
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And pulling off to the side of the road during gridlocked traffic conditions is hardly going to speed this. Most likely quite the opposite.
And there are a large number of driver assistance technologies in cars that are much safer than humans in gridlocked traffic conditions. Especially those that look in all 6 directions at the same time (something humans aren't very good at it seems, can't th
Um, BS detector went off. (Score:3)
Autopilot has no navigation features. It can hold the lane and avoid crashing into stuff. It will happily drive right by the exit the hospital, much less deliver you to the ER.
This story is less than truthful.
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There are two types of ETA indicator (assuming common word usage). Estimate time OF arrival and estimated time UNTIL arrival. Both are usually displayed. Probably the latter being referred to, based on context.
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Her name is Chinese (Eastern Turkic origin), and her husband's name is English. I'd be very cautious about assigning narrow meaning to either of their grammatical choices.
Notice that she isn't quoted; she is paraphrased. The person paraphrasing likely missed the finer details, and didn't ask. That's typical, ss you will learn if you are ever paraphrased!
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This story is less than truthful.
Because the actions described in the story were stupid absolutely does not imply that the story is untruthful.
And according to the summary, the baby was born in the passenger seat, and there was a driver with one hand on the steering wheel during the portion of the story where auto-[cruise-control] was engaged. It doesn't say anything about not making turns, or there not being a driver.
It's like "... on a computer!" But just, "with cruise control!"
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If she was sitting on the passenger's seat then this is not worth mentioning more than that she got out of bed that morning.
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It says right in the summary that she wasn't behind the wheel; her husband was.
There was a driver in the driver seat, with a hand on the wheel, operating the car while it was in it's lane-keeping-cruise-control mode.
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But I could be different in that respect
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Depends if they had the "full self driving" beta. That can navigate, although it's not very reliable.
It was supposed to only be available to "good" drivers, as determined from the driving data that Tesla harvests from its customers. The car watches the driver's every move, records things like sharp braking events, and reports it all back to Tesla.
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Autopilot has no navigation features. It can hold the lane and avoid crashing into stuff. It will happily drive right by the exit the hospital, much less deliver you to the ER.
This story is less than truthful.
Maybe they run FSD beta - but that would require looking in front almost constantly as the camera is watching the driver like an angry mother-in-law.
But FSD has NoA and if it was on the freeway, it could work (while on the freeway, not on city streets).
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<p>Autopilot has no navigation features. It can hold the lane and avoid crashing into stuff. It will happily drive right by the exit the hospital, much less deliver you to the ER.</p></quote>
Navigate on Autopilot (NoA) is a thing. Has been for years. Published and working long before the Full Self Driving (Beta). I personally NoA in a Tesla Model S (2017) model for several journeys (at least in terms of motorway interchanges). And in the UK, and it is known for working bet
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Based on your "knowledge" of the facts (which are just patently wrong)? Thin ice, sir, that is what you are on. ...
Pease don't spout off about things you don't know anything about.
I own a 2019 Model Y without FSD. You can enter a GPS destination and the driver can navigate based on the instructions that it gives. The Autopilot feature cannot take input from the navigation. It will hold the lane and adjust the speed and that's all.
Navigate on Autopilot (NoA) is a thing. Has been for years. Published and working long before the Full Self Driving (Beta)
Does anyone have any idea what this guy is talking about?
What a mess. (Score:1)
If it is an emergency you stop. (Score:3)
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Stopping? That's very early 1400s era thinking. In the late 1400s we invented things call "ambulances".
Interesting use case for a Lithium battery (Score:2)
Waters breaking from cabin compartment leaking into battery compartment...
Some people shoud not breed (Score:2)
Obviously cars now need Autodocs... (Score:1)
Gotta name it Nikola... (Score:1)
Question I haven't seen answered yet (Score:3)