eBusiness Weekly
By now, you’ve probably heard about the horrific Tesla crash that took place in a gated community in greater Houston late Saturday night.
This is what we know: two men, ages 59 and 69, are dead. Their bodies were extracted from a Tesla Model S that hit a tree roughly a third of a mile from the driveway and was engulfed by flames.
First responders reported that “no one” was behind the wheel: one man was in the passenger seat, and the other was in the back seat. Palmer Buck of the Woodlands Fire Department, who responded to the crash, told me that his crew scoured the nearby woods in case there was an ejection. They found no one.
Tesla crashes get a lot of media attention, a fact that irks the company and its legions of customers and fans.
They have a point: roughly 42 000 people died in motor vehicle accidents in 2020, according to preliminary estimates from the National Safety Council.
There are car crashes every day, but only Tesla crashes seem to make the news. The cycle has tended to be similar to how this story has played out:
Local media reports a crash involving a Tesla. If there is something particularly awful or strange about it, beat reporters take note. This crash was both awful and very, very strange.
The local police said “no one” was driving the car, which raised an immediate question: was Autopilot engaged at the time of the crash?
Was it engaged at any time from the moment the car left the driveway? Did the car’s owner and passenger think that Autopilot was on, but it wasn’t?
Autopilot is relatively new technology, so federal regulators also pay close attention to it.
Some early headlines from other news organizations used misleading language about a “driverless Tesla” which conflated two issues: whether a human being was behind the wheel and autonomous technology. Tesla’s cars are not fully autonomous.
When a gas-powered car catches on fire, first responders typically use foam to put it out.
But lithium-ion batteries that catch fire require copious amounts of water. The National Transportation Safety Board released a special investigative report on this very topic in January. The Model S in this case also caught on fire.
Then we get to US regulators. The Biden administration may take a tougher regulatory stance on automotive safety than the Trump administration.
Reporters asked whether investigators would be sent to examine this particular crash; on Monday, both the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said they would.
Then there is Tesla itself. In previous fatal crashes where Autopilot was a factor — Joshua Brown in Florida in 2016, Walter Huang in California in 2018 — Tesla put out blog posts detailing what they knew.
In this case, we have one carefully worded tweet from CEO Elon Musk in which he says that “data logs recovered so far show Autopilot was not enabled” and that this car’s owner did not purchase FSD, the feature Tesla refers to as Full Self Driving.
Musk may be right, or he may be selectively focusing on some aspects of the data logs and not others. Is it possible that Autopilot was enabled at some point, then was disabled or disengaged before impact?
I have a lot of questions about this crash. How fast was the car traveling? Speed limits are low in suburban neighbourhoods, but the impact was severe enough that the car was engulfed in flames.
NHTSA’s investigations team has initiated 28 reviews of various Tesla vehicle crashes, including this latest one in Texas. What in particular will the team focus on? The NTSB, meanwhile, said its investigation will “focus on the vehicle’s operation and the post-crash fire.”
Crash investigations, fire reports and autopsies will all take time and care to complete.
On Tesla Twitter, some have floated theories they think would absolve the company and its driver-assistance system, while others have been quick to blame Tesla for the way it’s marketed Autopilot and FSD.
Tesla sold roughly half a million cars around the world last year and likely will sell many more this year. Not every Tesla crash deserves media coverage.
But this one — two fatalities, odd circumstances and a fire — raises so many questions that it is warranted.
Efficiency-minded readers, move along – there’s nothing here for you. Electrification is never to be uttered in or around the 2021 Lamborghini Aventador SVJ Roadster. That’s because this production car and its V-12 engine, made at the Lamborghini factory in Bologna, Italy, is “truly unadulterated in its pursuit of power and speed,” as our colleague Hannah Elliott writes in her review. As pure a Lamborghini experience as you’ll get. — Bloomberg.
