On Friday, May 14, 2021 at 11:31:17 AM UTC-4, DerbyDad03 wrote:
On Friday, May 14, 2021 at 10:43:46 AM UTC-4, Leon wrote:
On 5/13/2021 10:52 PM, DerbyDad03 wrote:
On Thursday, May 13, 2021 at 9:54:44 PM UTC-4, Leon wrote:
On 5/13/2021 7:59 PM, Markem618 wrote:
On Thu, 13 May 2021 20:48:15 -0400, wrote:

On Thu, 13 May 2021 10:46:59 -0400, knuttle
wrote:


As you sit in the gas line or are looking for a station with gas, DON"T
you wish your car was powered by on of the small nuclear reactor like
those they have use to power satellites for decades?

I'm not sure I want to be driving around on several pounds of
plutonium.

Yes but they do want you driving around with a load of Lithium. Safer
by a pretty good margin but.

For some maybe. LOL. Take the doctor and his attorney buddy in Houston
a few weeks ago. Left the doctors house in his Tesla with his buddy.
Leaving home and 800 feet later a firey crash into some trees, going 30
mph. The fire department had a difficult time putting those batteries
out once the caught fire.

And an odd side note, no on was in the drivers seat. They found 2
unidentifiable, not even enough for dental records, bodies in the back seat.

From: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...marshal-report

"Teslas vice president of vehicle engineering, Lars Moravy, said Monday on an
earnings call that the company found the steering wheel of the vehicle to be
deformed, leading to the likelihood that someone was in the drivers seat at
the time of the crash.
And yet no body was found in the drivers seat.... The front seat could
have been holding the doctors bag and or the attorneys brief case to
fool the vehicle into believing some one was in the front drivers seat....
I'm not saying that you're wrong, but *something* deformed the steering
wheel and I'm pretty sure that a doctor's bag [do doctors actually carry
bags anymore ;-) ] and/or an attorney's briefcase would not:

1 - Be heavy enough to convince the car that a human was sitting in the seat
2 - Be strong enough or positioned correctly to deform the steering wheel

On my Hondas, the weight range to turn on the "Passenger Air Bag Off"
light is somewhere 0 up to 65 lbs. I am assuming (I know, dangerous) that
the Tesla has a higher threshold to determine if a passenger is in the driver's
seat. Heck, I don't even know if it checks, but if it does, I'd bet it's higher than
the weight of the average 10 YO. i.e. much heavier than your average brief case.

By passenger, I obviously meant "person".


If this had happened on NCIS or CSI, there would have been a multiple perfectly
situated security cameras to determine where the occupants were sitting. ;-)
Or they'd build a scale (or maybe even full-sized) model and recreate the
crash to see if the driver could have been knocked into the rear seat by the
impact.

The authorities (or probably Tesla) may even be doing that in this case.

The company didnt have an immediate comment on the report. Its cooperating
with investigators.

Police with the Harris County Precinct 4 Constables Office initially said that
€œno one€� was in the drivers seat, which led to speculation that the vehicles
Autopilot technology may have been a factor. Chief Executive Officer Elon
Musk took to Twitter to refute that notion.

William Varner, 59, and Everette Talbot, 69, were both found dead when first
responders arrived on scene. Talbot was seated in the right front passenger
seat with his upper torso €œin a forward-leaning position, with both arms rolled
forward." Varner was seated in the left rear passenger seat with his upper torso
€œin a rear-leaning position, with both arms rolled back and in a pugilistic pose.€� €�

Somebody mentioned Darwin a little earlier in the thread. This was written in
another article:

"...on Monday, Tesla founder Elon Musk wrote on Twitter that "data logs recovered
so far show Autopilot was not enabled & this car did not purchase FSD" -- a
reference to "full self-driving" capability.
And yet, you cannot argue with 2 cooked bodies and neither was in the
drivers seat.
I can't argue, but I can speculate. There are studies that show that the "yielding seats"
that many car makers use these days are actually more dangerous than non-yielding
seats. Some say that the manufacturers can get away with using cheaper, inferior seats
by claiming that the yielding feature absorbs the energy of the collision.. Perhaps the seat
failed allowing the driver to be thrown into the rear seat. Hopefully, a full forensic
analysis of the vehicle will determine what actually happened.

(Do I know if Tesla uses yielding seats to keep the cost down? No. That's why I called
this merely speculation.)


"Moreover,'' he continued, "standard Autopilot would require lane lines to turn on,
which this street did not have." "
That would explain the crash but not how the car made it to the crash site.

Perhaps the good doctor had more money than brains.

That was the obvious.