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The car came to rest more than 70 metres away, on the opposite side of the road, leaving a trail of wreckage. According to witnesses, the Model S burst into flames while still airborne. Several passersby tried to open the doors and rescue the driver, but they couldn’t unlock the car. When they heard explosions and saw flames through the windows, they retreated. Even the firefighters, who arrived 20 minutes later, could do nothing but watch the Tesla burn.

At that moment, Rita Meier was unaware of the crash. She tried calling her husband, but he didn’t pick up. When he still hadn’t returned her call hours later – highly unusual for this devoted father – she attempted to track his car using Tesla’s app. It no longer worked. By the time police officers rang her doorbell late that night, Meier was already bracing for the worst.

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[-] TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.ca 174 points 3 weeks ago

If we lived in any sort of reasonable or responsible world then these cars would be banned from public roads all over the globe.

[-] OutlierBlue@lemmy.ca 79 points 3 weeks ago

And Tesla would be fined and sued into oblivion.

[-] spankmonkey@lemmy.world 54 points 3 weeks ago

And the people who knowingly put profits before lives would be individually serve time for manslaughter.

[-] leftist_lawyer@lemmy.today 7 points 3 weeks ago

Not to mention obstructing criminal investigations.

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[-] Ulrich@feddit.org 12 points 3 weeks ago

Every study ever done on the subject has concluded that vehicle fires happen far less in electric vehicles than ICE ones. If you want to talk about responsibility we would ban them all.

[-] Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com 9 points 3 weeks ago

100 fires that you can actually put out is better than 1 you can't.

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[-] sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml 130 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Article does not actually answer why Tesla vehicles crash as much as they do or how their crash frequency compares to other vehicles. Its more about how scummy tesla is as a company and how it witholds data from the public when it could incriminate them.

[-] GroundedGator@lemmy.world 65 points 3 weeks ago

In some ways that is the answer. Crashes keep happening because they are not being held accountable to regulators because they are not reporting these incidents and no one is exercising oversight to be sure the reporting matches reality.

I think over the years, accurate reporting by manufacturers has been done because they generally do not want to be known as that car company that killed a child and it could have been prevented with a 50 cent bolt. As a result, regulators have been less hawkish. Of course there are probably political donations in the US to help keep the wheels turning.

[-] TimewornTraveler@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

just scanning the article, it seems to sum it up as - No one knows why yet, not even Tesla '

[-] sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml 18 points 3 weeks ago

With a dash of - Tesla might know and be withholding information

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[-] dickalan@lemmy.world 6 points 3 weeks ago

Yeah, it’s because they didn’t put a lidar on their fucking cars because they’re cheap, It’s not a mystery, why don’t you know this?

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[-] RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 72 points 3 weeks ago

Tesla tried to do it all at once instead of perfecting the electric tech first and then incrementally adding on advances. They also made change for change’s sake. There’s absolutely no reason mechanical door locks could not have been engineered to work on this car as the default method of opening and closing the door. It’s killing people.

[-] ZMonster@lemmy.world 32 points 3 weeks ago

There's absolutely a reason to not engineer something you're not required to. It's called capitalism. Tesla cut every corner they could.

[-] theneverfox@pawb.social 18 points 3 weeks ago

No, the problem is they engineered something they didn't need to, because Musk thinks everything should be electric because it's cool. They had to then engineer a mechanical release, because it was required by law (for good reason)

Mechanical door locks would have been cheaper. The fly by wire in the cyber truck is far more expensive, heavier, and far more dangerous than the very well polished power steering systems every other car uses

Maybe it's something like they wanted to make more money on repairs or something... But even that they could've done better by starting from very common, cheap technology

Let's be clear... The real problem here is that Elon Musk, opinion having idiot that he is, made decisions from on high with very little understanding of engineering

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[-] Thedogdrinkscoffee@lemmy.ca 14 points 3 weeks ago

Elon : some of you will die, but that is a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

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[-] Scrollone@feddit.it 24 points 3 weeks ago

Also, the fact that they removed Lidar sensors and just base their self driving on cameras is plainly stupid.

[-] AA5B@lemmy.world 6 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

In this crash, part of the blame was on retracting handles on the outside, not the interior locks. If the handle is retracted, it’s tough to open the door from the outside.

  • model s has electrically presented handles. The car has to be somewhat functional for the handles to extend …. I haven’t heard of extend on emergency or extend on power lost, or any other failsafe
  • model 3/y door handles are not electrical. You have to press on one end to extend the other. You may or may not like them, but at least they don’t have that failure case of what happens when the car loses power
[-] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 43 points 3 weeks ago

Wait, I might know the answer. Is it because they don't use LIDAR and they're made by a company headed by some piece of shit who likes to cut costs? Haha, I was just guessing, but ok.

[-] NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 39 points 3 weeks ago

You can choose not to drive bleeding edge technology, but sadly you have no choice in whether to share the road with it.

[-] JoMiran@lemmy.ml 36 points 3 weeks ago

I drive a BMW i4 and one of the reasons I prefer it is because it still uses a number of mechanical options like physical buttons and an actual door handle. I never trusted that flush handle from Tesla, even back when I liked Tesla.

[-] firepenny@lemmy.world 26 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Seems like a lot of this technology is very untested and there are too many variables to make it where it should not be out on the roads.

[-] deathbird@mander.xyz 17 points 3 weeks ago

Move fast and break things, but it's a passenger vehicle on a public road.

[-] itsprobablyfine@sh.itjust.works 15 points 3 weeks ago

It's been a nightmare seeing tech companies move into the utility space and act like they're the smartest people in the room and the experts that have been doing it for 100 years are morons. Move fast and break things isn't viable when you're operating power infrastructure either. There's a reason why designs require the seal of a licensed engineer before they can be constructed. Applying a software development mentality to any kind of engineering is asking for fatalities

[-] shiroininja@lemmy.world 24 points 3 weeks ago

Bad code. Guinea pig owners. Cars not communicating with each other. Relying on just the car’s vision and location is stupid.

[-] andrewrgross@slrpnk.net 20 points 3 weeks ago

Also, not only do they rely on "just vision", crucially they rely on real-time processing without any memory or persistent mapping.

This, more than anything else is what bewilders me most.

They could map an area, and when observing a construction hazard save that data and share it with other vehicles so they know when route setting or anticipate the object. Not they don't. If it drives past a hazard and goes around the block it has to figure out how to navigate the hazard again with no familiarity. That's so foolish.

[-] pupbiru@aussie.zone 6 points 3 weeks ago

and what’s even more ridiculous than that (imo) is that if every tesla mapped the area, you’d get it from loads of different angles: no more “oops 1 off computer vision edge case”

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[-] vegeta@lemmy.world 21 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

the truth? Because Elon is the CEO errrr Teknoking.

[-] mhague@lemmy.world 17 points 3 weeks ago

What kind of engineers work at Tesla? I feel like normal people get anxiety over deleting databases or deploying secrets to production. Accidentally taking a service down.

But there you have all kinds of terrible things happening and it's purely because your company knows how to work policy makers. A dad dies in a fireball and what, it's an emergency meeting? Something you look into first thing Monday morning?

[-] MajorasMaskForever@lemmy.world 7 points 3 weeks ago

Working in the aerospace industry has given me a lot of insight into the different ways engineers rationalize the potential for harm that they cause. The most common is wilful ignorance or straight up denial. No, the products I work on can never hurt anyone, it's just xyz I know personally engineers who work on weaponry and fall heavily into that camp and it blows my mind.

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[-] medem@lemmy.wtf 15 points 3 weeks ago

I first thought this article was about their self driving cars and I was like who tf gets in a self driving car with their baby. It's not. It's about Tesla cars in general. Scary stuff.

[-] TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 14 points 3 weeks ago

News of malfunctioning Tesla cars and Musk going crazy are still not enough to crash Tesla stocks to zero. Which I am hoping will happen not just to inflict sorrow on Musk and his wealth, but so that I could hedge against the stock 😂

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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
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