The ~2010 runaway Toyota hysteria was ultimately blamed on mechanical problems less than half the time. Floor mats jamming the pedal, drivers mixing up gas/brake pedals in panic, downright lying to evade a speeding ticket, etc were cause for many cases.

I owned an FJ80 Land Cruiser when that happened. I printed up a couple stickers for myself, and for a buddy who owned a Tacoma, that said "I'm not speeding, my pedal's stuck!" (yes I'm aware the FJ80 was slow as dogshit, that didn't stop me from speeding).

I have no sources for this so take with a grain of salt... But I've heard that Tesla turns off self driving just before an accident so they can say it was the drivers fault. Now in this case, if it was on while it drove on the tracks I would think would prove it's Tesla's faulty self driving plus human error for not correcting it. Either way it would prove partly Tesla's fault if it was on at the time.

That would require their self driving algorithm to actually detect an accident. I doubt it's capable of doing so consistently.

On a related note, getting unstuck from something like train tracks is a pretty significant hurdles. The only real way is to back up IF turning onto the tracks wasn't a drop down of the same depth as the rails. Someone who is caught off guard isn't going to be able to turn a passenger car off the tracks because the rails are tall and getting an angle with the wheels to get over them isn't really available.

So while in a perfect world the driver would have slammed on the brakes immediately before it got onto the tracks, getting even the front wheels onto the tracks because they weren't fast enough may have been impossible to recover from and going forward might have been their best bet. Depends on how the track crossing is built.

I mean... I have seen some REALLY REALLY stupid drivers so I could totally see multiple people thinking they found a short cut or not realizing the road they are supposed to be on is 20 feet to the left and there is a reason their phone is losing its shit all while their suspension is getting destroyed.

But yeah. It is the standard tesla corp MO. They detect a dangerous situation and disable all the "self driving". Obviously because it is up to the driver to handle it and not because they want the legal protection to say it wasn't their fault.

Pretty sure they can tell the method used when disengaging fsd/ap. So they would know if it was manually turned off or if the system lost enough info and shut it down. They should be able to tell within a few seconds if accuracy the order of events. I can't imagine a scenario that wouldn't be blatantly obvious where the tesla was able to determine an accident was imminent and shut off fsd/ap wroth enough time to "blame it on the driver". What might be possible is that the logs show fsd shut off like a millisecond before impact/event and then someone merely reported that fsd was not engaged at the time of the accident. Technically true and tesla lawyers might fight like hell to maintain that theory, but if an independent source is able to review the logs, I don't see that being a possibility.

Of course they know, they're using it to hide the truth. Stop giving a corporation the benefit of the doubt where public safety is concerned, especially when they've been shown to abuse it in the past

Maybe if they use LIDAR like they should have instead of just cameras it wouldn’t be such an issue, but they’re determined to minimize costs and maximize profits at the expense of consumers as are all publicly traded companies

How symbolic

Furthermore, with the amount of telemetry that those cars have The company knows whether it was in self drive or not when it went onto the track. So the fact that they didn't go public saying it wasn't means that it was in self-drive mode and they want to save the PR face and liability.

And who is going to willingly get into a Tesla Taxi?!?!

I guess I'm a train now.

I have a nephew that worked at Tesla as a software engineer for a couple years (he left about a year ago). I gave him the VIN to my Tesla and the amount of data he shared with me was crazy. He warned me that one of my brake lights was regularly logging errors. If their telemetry includes that sort of information then clearly they are logging a LOT of data.

At this point, if anybody buys one of these vehicles from Tesla, they absolutely deserve what they get. It is absurd.

Self-driving not being reliable yet is one of the biggest disappointments of the last decade.

You could not pay me to drive a Tesla.

What a cool and futuristic car. It’s all computer!

I’m still waiting for Elon’s car to drive onto train tracks.

You still don't have to get in for one to hit you. I ride a motorcycle and I'm always sketched out when there's a Tesla behind me

That, and little kids... and motorcycles... and school busses

Since the story has 3 separate incidents where "the driver let their Tesla turn left onto some railroad tracks" I'm going to posit:

Teslas on self-drive mode will turn left onto railroad tracks unless forcibly restrained.

Prove me wrong, Tesla