Posted on 04/18/2021 10:32:23 AM PDT by DFG
Two men died after a Tesla 'on autopilot with no one driving' crashed into a tree in Houston before starting a huge fire that took 32,000 gallons of water to extinguish.
The fully-electric 2019 Tesla Model S slammed into the tree in Carlton Woods at around 11.25pm on Saturday night before bursting into flames with the passengers still inside.
Harris County Precinct 4 Constable Mark Herman said an investigation had found that 'no one was driving' when the accident happened, with one man sitting in the passenger seat at the front and the second sitting in the back.
Officials told KPRC 2 that the $80,000 vehicle was moving at high speed when it failed to negotiate a cul-de-sac turn, ran off the road and crashed.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
I dunno, but they ain’t gettin’ any older.
Yeah, try driving from Dallas to El Paso without cruise control. Sometimes, you can go miles from Pecos to Van Horn without seeing a vehicle .
Technically that’s a class D fire. Those have to be smothered.
The chemicals in Tesla batteries ignite when exposed to air.
IIRC the battery in that car is about 1500 pounds. Lots of fuel.
This is culling the heard of stupid people.
_——the smartest person in the car was driving, sadly , not well.
I don’t mind cruise control (to avoid tickets), and wouldn’t mind lane departure warnings and automatic braking if approaching a vehicle too rapidly. But those latter systems, if off warranty, are horrendously expensive to get repaired — thousands. And your liability insurance might not cover the vehicle until repaired.
What they were thinking was that they didn’t want the whole neighborhood to go up in flames. The water would have been used to keep adjacent flammable structures from igniting.
That’s all well and good until these cars still killing pedestrians and people in other cars.
“This is culling the heard of stupid people. On guy in the passenger seat, one in the rear seat and no one in the drivers seat? And their thinking they’re perfectly safe as they haul azz down the road? And they both end up burning to death?”
This is not inherently a bad thing, but it’s very economically inefficient and endangers others randomly. Basically, it won’t scale.
“I clicked your freep name. I knew right away you weren’t from Texas. We’ve got big long roads out here. Cruise control and cold A/C. Must have options.”
Ditto. I’ve never lived anywhere that they weren’t must-haves. I wouldn’t sit in the passenger seat while the car drives me, but I somehow overcame my fear of cruise control (lol) about 50 years ago. “Big long roads out here” - Chris Rea reference?
I’m guessing that firefighters who arrive on the scene and find a car fully engulfed in flames can’t automatically tell that it’s a Tesla.
I understand what an electrical fire takes to put out. That’s pretty basic. But this occurred in major city, and no foam for 4 freaking hours?
I use The term “Car yoga”
This is for people like myself who have to drive long hours every day in and out of traffic or on highways
I developed this after having a sharp pain in my right leg that I developed a few decades ago and I realized it was from hitting the gas and the break and the gas and the break over and over in traffic
The first theory of car yoga is: use neutral!
When you’re at a stoplight when you’re at a traffic light when you’re in traffic that stop and start Start using neutral all the time
By using neutral you can have no hands on the wheel or on any pedals and the car will just sit there motionless
Using neutral is the number one aspect to Car yoga
Number two
Cruise control
If you’re on the highway going 60 miles an hour and there’s no reasonable traffic to be expected - always use cruise control
You can log out and end of cruise control repeatedly add a few miles per hour up or down it’s very easy
Again then you can drive hundreds of miles and not have to touch any pedals at all
Now I’m completely and utterly opposed to electric vehicles and self driving cars
A third purely aesthetic aspect of car yoga is when you’re crossing very scenic places such as bridges put it in a low mile per hour both hands on the wheel and look around at the beautiful scenery
Car yoga
But... But... At least they were saving the planet from fossil fuels, right? If only that tree could talk, I’d like to know it’s opinion on it.
Depending on what kind of car you have, most of them can probably be permanently turned off by hacking the ECU. I turned off a bunch of stuff on my Audi that I didn't like. I also turned on a bunch of features that I liked, but didn't pay for. :-)
Darwin Award.
Well, when they saw the water wasn't doing nothing, you'd think it would have occurred to them to put foam on it.
My question is, they fought this fire for 4 hours in a major city, and the fire departments didn't put foam on it? Do they not have firefighting foam in Houston?
The electrical cars are the Napalm bombs on the roads. Hushed fact.
Bush fire, the largest fire in AZ last year, was caused by Prius battery catching fire and pulling out of the road.
Almost 200,000 acres were scorched by the inferno.
That really helped the environment :-)
BTW, all what the media reported - human caused fire. Technically true, but not what really happened.
If you read it, you would think that some idiotic moron was playing with fire. No, it was an environmentally conscious woman, trying to save her life from battery fire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_Fire_(Arizona)
Oh yeah my bad misread that...
Still a bad outcome!
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