Why Is A Tesla Crash National News?

Hands-free Doesn’t Mean Brain-free

In the car accident pictured above, this Tesla Model S ran into a firetruck at 60 miles per house without breaking. It was unknown whether or not the Autopilot feature was engaged at the time, but what was truly remarkable about this crash was that the driver walked away with only a broken ankle.

She ran full-on into a firetruck at 60 miles per hour and only sustained a broken ankle! Why is that not the headline story?

“On March 23, (2018, Walter) Huang crashed his Model X into a median on a California highway while the SUV was operating in Autopilot mode. Tesla recovered the logs from the vehicle, and upon analyzing them said that the driver had received “several visual and one audible” cue to take back control of the car.” A guy was driving carelessly, not using the car in the way it was intended and he crashed. Whether it was in Auto-pilot or not, that is driver error.

Cars crash every single day most often due to driver error. “There are about 10 million accidents of all kinds each year, from parking lot scrapes to multi-car pileups, according to the National Safety Council; in 2009, just three of every 1,000 of those accidents involved fatalities.” And yet when a Tesla crashes, it’s national news, even if the crash did not involve Auto-pilot and showed clear implications of driver error. I think that’s because as much as Americans love a winner, they also love the shadenfreude of seeing him somehow brought down a peg, particularly when that person is creating innovations that show the rest of us how old and tired our thinking is. Innovations in the automotive industry have been creeping along at a snail’s pace for decades and so when they suddenly start to run like a racehorse, it kind of shakes some people up.

“In a recent (July 2017) interview, the MD of Daimler Benz (Mercedes Benz) said their competitors are no longer other car companies but Tesla (obvious), Google, Apple, Amazon.”

Full hands-free Auto-pilot is a fairly new technology, and as with most new technologies, it wasn’t immediately perfect, although it is constantly being improved, perfected, and adjusted. This is in part why you cannot currently take your hands off the steering wheel for more than 2 minutes at a time without being prompted to put them back on. This was not always the case, however. Tesla announced in 2015 that it would remove some self-driving features as a way to curb risky behavior. In other words, stupid people were behaving stupidly and the technology had to be adjusted to account for that more fully. Hands-free is not intended to be brain-free. You still have to pay attention to your surroundings and managing the driving of the car, even if it is doing a lot to assist you with that. When SatNav become available in cars in the mid-90s and stupid people turned left into the lake, it wasn’t the fault of the SatNav.

Another Auto-pilot issue has to do with poorly marked lanes and other markers that the car would use to judge where it needs to go. If local roads are too poorly marked, you will not be able to engage Auto-pilot, but if roads are sporadically marked, it will affect how well Auto-pilot is able to perform. Tesla continues to upgrade it’s technology on a regular basis and owners get software improvements pushed to them remotely as needed, related to all aspects of the car. There is no other vehicle on the market where you always have the latest version, no matter when you purchased it.

For all the videos out there of Auto-pilot behaving imperfectly, there are more showing Auto-pilot averting accidents. The National Transportation Safety Administration views driver-assisted technologies as the path towards increased safety on the roads.

“Driver assistance technologies not only keep drivers and passengers safe, but they keep other drivers and pedestrians safe, too.”

“Tesla’s crash rate dropped 40 percent after the electric carmaker installed its semi-autonomous Autopilot software, government regulators reported today.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration just released its report on the May 2016 fatal accident involving a Tesla Model S. Within the document, the government reports that the number of crashes dropped dramatically after Tesla introduced Autopilot in 2015, a fact that would seem to bolster the company’s claims about the safety of semi-autonomous features in its vehicles.”

Electric cars do pose some potential challenges in the event that they catch on fire, but electric cars of various types are only going to become more and more prevalent, and they don’t tend to catch on fire on a regular basis, particularly as compared with how many gasoline cars catch on fire each year.

“Last year (2013) there were 172,000 gasoline-powered car fires, a little-known fact. Given that some 240 million cars are registered, that means a fire for every 1,300 or 1,400 cars on the road. Compare that to three fires from some 20,000 Tesla cars. The fire incidents are over four times as great in gasoline-powered cars.”

Tesla already has many safety features in place to minimize the chance of fires in the first place and in keeping fires from reaching the passenger compartment in the eventuality that they do happen. Continuing to learn how to deal with this eventuality most effectively is just a part of progress.

You (the national news outlets) can continue to do the modern version of “Jeb, I don’t know if them daggum horseless carriages are a good idea or not?” or you can embrace that new technology takes time to perfect and notice all the ways that it is already improving and saving lives. When you see photos of a Tesla crash, the front end is always crumpled to hell. That’s intentional; it’s what allows the driver to walk away with minor injuries in many, many cases.

You can acknowledge that the greatest safety issue with all cars continues to be driver error and that taking potshots at Musk because he’s an innovative genius and you’re not is childish and petty. The fact that Tesla crashes are always national news, even though they happen many, many times less than crashes of other kinds of cars, just shows a national news outlet preoccupation with inventing drama when there really isn’t any and a vast swath of the populace who is ready and willing to buy into whatever they are selling at the moment.

And yes, in case you are wondering, I am a happy and satisfied Tesla owner. I’ve never cared much about cars before, but this past year with my Model X has been some of the most comfortable and enjoyable driving I’ve ever done. The safety ratings are outstanding and I love the constant software upgrades that keep all the technology at the leading edge. But my personal opinion isn’t really what matters; the numbers all speak for themselves.