5d ago

‘The vehicle suddenly accelerated with our baby in it’: the terrifying truth about why Tesla’s cars keep crashing

www.theguardian.com

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.

164 comments

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.
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.
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?
- 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.
  
  The guilty don't feel guilty, they learn not to. Easy to sleep at night when u can stuff ur pillow with 100's.
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.
- There's absolutely a reason to not engineer something you're not required to. It's called capitalism. Tesla cut every corner they could.
  
  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
  
  Elon : some of you will die, but that is a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
  
  By your logic then, capitalism is great, because that means no one would've engineered these crazy locks but instead just used the tried and true ones.
  Wait. That's not what happened?
  Oh.
- Also, the fact that they removed Lidar sensors and just base their self driving on cameras is plainly stupid.
  
  Technical debt.
  If you promise self driving on all cars, but cars already on the road don't have lidar then no car has lidar.
- 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
  
  Just FYI all the Tesla cars to my knowledge need power for the doors to open because the handles aren’t physically attached to the door mechanism. They’re all electronic. If you own one of these cars I highly advise you to read the manual and find out where the mechanical door releases are(they’re somewhat hidden).
  Another fun fact and this isn’t exclusive to Tesla. If you pay attention when you open the door the window retracts a tiny bit to clear the weatherstripping. If you have no power that can’t happened. What is unique to Tesla as far as I can tell is that their weatherstripping isn’t as large/pliable as other manufacturers or maybe it’s just the assembly. Using the mechanical release with power still retracts the window. In the event the battery is dead or damaged from an accident using the mechanical release requires breaking the window. That means the door is significantly more difficult to open.
If we lived in any sort of reasonable or responsible world then these cars would be banned from public roads all over the globe.
- And Tesla would be fined and sued into oblivion.
  
  And the people who knowingly put profits before lives would be individually serve time for manslaughter.
  
  Tesla would be charged to dissolve, or forced to forfeit assets to the government.
- Call me a Luddite but I won't ride in a "self driving" car. I don't even trust lane assist although I've never had a car with that feature.
  I think my sweet spot is 2014 for vehicles. It's about 50/50 with the tracking garbage and the "advanced features" on those models but anything past 2015 seems to be fully fly-by-wire and that doesn't sit right with me.
  I'm old though and honestly if I bought a 2014 right now and babied it as my non commuter car I could probably keep it until I should give up my keys. You younger people are going to have to work around all this crap.
  
  I liked lane assist. It's kind of like the Playstation triggers haptic feedback. It just makes the wheel slightly stiff as you near a line, but it's very passive.
  
  I have a Sprinter van with lane assist for cross country travel. As obnoxious as it is 99% of the time, it has come in clutch a few times when I started to get drowsy and drifted off my lane.
  
  As a pedestrian I trust waymos more than human drivers
  
  I've never had any issue with the lane assist in my Mitsubishi. It's absolutely built as an "assist" and not something that will actually try to take control from you. It's trivial to "overpower" it manually and turn out of your lane without signaling if that's what you want to do, but does a perfectly reasonable job of steering on its own when left to its own devices.
  That said, I wouldn't be driving a vehicle new enough to have the feature yet either if I hadn't been rear ended a couple of years ago and had my 2012 Lancer written off. :(
  
  I think Ford does a good job of offering the features and tech, but not making them required. Even their EVs have settings that can mimic a gas driving experience. Be a Luddite trust what you trust. But don’t pigeon hole your acceptable years of manufacture.
  
  My wife had a rental for a trip she and my daughter were going on for a gymnastics event and I got to drive it back from the rental place and it had lane assist.
  Every time another car passed in the opposite lane the damn thing would try and jerk in the opposite direction of that car, sometimes almost running itself off the road into the ditch in the process.
  
  Drove a few cars with "lane hold" and it's infuriating to have to suddenly correct the car's trajectory at every curve because it misjudges the road line. Some cars are worse than others but it was literally the first thing I disabled every time. I wonder how truck drivers feel about it. Do modern trucks even have this?
  
  I've got a 2008 manual. It doesn't even have cruise control. It's perfect. I'm keeping it as long as I possibly can.
- 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.
  
  100 fires that you can actually put out is better than 1 you can't.
- They don’t need to be banned. We just need to not buy them.
- Humans first
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.
- 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.
- just scanning the article, it seems to sum it up as - No one knows why yet, not even Tesla '
  
  With a dash of - Tesla might know and be withholding information
  
  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?
- That you, Elon?
You can choose not to drive bleeding edge technology, but sadly you have no choice in whether to share the road with it.
This is the kind of shit that makes me worried even seeing someone else driving one of these deathtraps near me while I am driving. They could explode or decide to turn into me on the highway or something. I think I about this more than Final Destination when seeing a logging truck these days.
- It's one of those rules you make for yourself when you drive...
  Like no driving next to people with dents...
  Or
  Stay away from trucks with random shit in the back not strapped down ...
  No driving near New cars, they are new and or it's because they got into an accident so best just be safe...
  So
  No driving near a Tesla...
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.
- Move fast and break things, but it's a passenger vehicle on a public road.
  
  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
I have never ridden a Tesla, and I plan on requesting a non Tesla car from now on when I have to take a taxi.
Cars in general, Teslas in particular, should have a standardized blackbox data recorder that third parties can open and access the logs, we have had this kind of tech on aircrafts for many decades.
It is terrifying that Tesla can just say that there was no relevant data and the investigative agency will just accept that.
I remember watching an episode of Air Crash Investigations, where a plane crashed, and they could not find an immediate cause, but the flight data recorder was able to be analysed far back, way before the accident flight, and they noticed that a mount for the APU turbine had broken many flights earlier, and the APU had broken free during the flight, causing the crash.
It is not Tesla's job to tell the investigators what is relevant and not, it is Teslas job to unlock all data they have and send it to the investigators, if they can't or won't, then Tesla should lose the right sell cars in Europe
- Cars do have that in what amounts to a TCU or Telematics Control Unit. The main problem here isn't whether or not cars have that technology. It's about the relevant government agency forcing companies like Tesla (and other automakers) to produce that data not just when there's a crash, but as a matter of course.
  I have a lot of questions about why Tesla's are allowed on public roads when some of the models haven't been crash tested. I have a lot of questions about why a company wouldn't hand over data in the event of a crash without the requirement of a court order. I don't necessarily agree that cars should be able to track us (if I buy it I own it and nobody should have that kind of data without my say so). But since we already have cars that do phone this data home, local, state, and federal government should have access to it. Especially when insurance companies are happy to use it to place blame in the event of a crash so they don't have to pay out an insurance policy.
- They do have an EDR you can access.
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.
- Other road users don't have anything to do with it though, including those who aren't even driving
It sounds like it tracked who drives and who was into the car to decide if they were worth crashing.
You know, to maximize the most evil to the world.
Bad code. Guinea pig owners. Cars not communicating with each other. Relying on just the car’s vision and location is stupid.
- 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.
  
  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”
  
  indeed. new experiences should be remembered...like a human.
- If they would use lidar you would get speed and distance from surrounding objects, which seems like valuable data for a moving object. With cameras you get a 2d picture that can only guestimate distance using multiple cameras and software.
the truth? Because Elon is the CEO errrr Teknoking.
Tesla’s garbage quality is sadly hurting the entire EV and self driving industry. Self driving cars will always have accidents. But a good self driving company will use every single accident to ensure that never happens again with their system. Humans can make the same error over and over but once self driving has been around a while, the rates of sef driving caused accidents will reduce more and more every year.
- We'll never have self-driving cars en masse, because for some reason society has accepted that humans make mistakes and sometimes people die, but they can't do the same for robots, even if they make far fewer of them.
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 😂
- You should nuke us. We're hopeless.
- Quarrantine, a cordon sanitaire.
FYI, some numbers. The guardian article is still definitely worth reading, it just had no statistics.
*Nationally (USA), Tesla drivers had 26.67 accidents per 1,000 drivers. This was up from 23.54 last year.
The Ram and Subaru brands were again among the most accident-prone. Ram had 23.15 per 1,000 drivers while Subaru had 22.89.
...
As of October 2024, there have been hundreds of documented nonfatal incidents involving Autopilot and fifty-one reported fatalities, forty-four of which NHTSA investigations or expert testimony later verified and two that NHTSA’s Office of Defect Investigations verified as happening during the engagement of Full Self-Driving (FSD).*
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebanker/2025/02/11/tesla-again-has-the-highest-accident-rate-of-any-auto-brand/
Several passersby tried to open the doors and rescue the driver, but they couldn’t unlock the car.
Even the firefighters, who arrived 20 minutes later, could do nothing but watch the Tesla burn.
Did no one think to break open the windows?
- Yes, that must be it... they didn't think to break a window.
  Many modern cars use laminated glass on their side windows now and, as far as I'm aware, this model has doors that won't open from the outside without power, making them very difficult to break open without tools even when the vehicle isn't on fire. 20 minutes in to the Tesla burning, when it was already sitting on top of a bomb of a battery... you're beyond fucked at that point. Difficult to just put the fire out for responders, a rescue was over about 15 minutes prior.
  
  Thanks for serving a side of snark while teaching others.
  I fucking hate cars, so this is a shit design feature (coming from a design engineer myself).
supercars...
Maybe take the baby out so it slows down?
It's simple, you condemn Elon just because you envy him.
- I guess you’re one of those I got mine fuck you types. Booooring
  
  I am one of those who do not participate in the circus performance. I just sit in the front row and watch the clowns.
- Clearly this premise, upon which your further exchanges are based, is complete bullshit.
  You are a troll, presumably one for whom any response is a win. It gives you a little dopamine hit.
  What a pathetic place to get to. There are a million ways to get a dopamine hit less pathetic than this, including all of the major addictive drugs.
  
  Don't feed the troll.
  
  oh yes, I felt good just now...
- Bait used to be believable.
- The very least he could do is not sell unsafe vehicles. It's literally the very least he can do but he can't be asked to do that because of his ego. I condemn him for that.
  
  Lord, just think about how many people any other car manufacturer kills...
- Lol
At 3.18pm on 10 May 2018, Stefan Meier lost control of his Model S on the A2 highway near the Monte Ceneri tunnel. Travelling at about 100kmh (62mph), he ploughed through several warning markers and traffic signs before crashing into a slanted guardrail. “The collision with the guardrail launches the vehicle into the air, where it flips several times before landing,” investigators would write later.
The driver crashed, it doesn't sound like it was in self driving mode.
- The car doesn't have to be in self driving mode for the fault to be Tesla's - for example, the pedals on the cybertruck sliding off and sticking down the accelerator.
  
  A stuck pedal turns the steering towards the barrier? I think the driver had a stroke or heart attack and stopped steering
- I'm almost won over by your charming manners, but...
  What is your source?
  What happens when the severity of accidents are taken into account? Because it could be this: Tesla Has the Highest Fatal Accident Rate of All Auto Brands, Study Finds
  Tesla's self-driving features expose their cars to a distinctive kind of risk. It would be important to distinguish the accidents where this played a part.
  Regardless of the statistics, there are some other clear design problems with Tesla's, such as batteries that explode in a crash and doors that won't open without power (not to mention autopilot's limited camera-only inputs and software glitches). These are still concerns specific to Tesla that other brands don't share, so again it's worth reviewing accidents where these played a role when gauging Tesla's safety.
- That's some nice fact cherry picking, and it ignores Tesla's ongoing campaign to hide and obfuscate their crash records from the NHTSA and the public.
- 510 reviewed crashes, resulting in one REVIEWED crash for every 5,098 Teslas
  you dropped a unit in your analysis. I fixed it for you.
- you are an embarrassment
- Reported and reviewed are the same word so your math checks out.
Natural Selection.
- Someone's $50,000+ car malfunctioning and killing them isn't natural selection. That's not what that term means.
  
  They bought and trusted a Tesla and it almost ended their bloodline.
  They're not the fittest.

164 comments