Tesla Safety Prevented Murder-Suicide – Drove Off a 250 Foot Cliff

19 thoughts on “Tesla Safety Prevented Murder-Suicide – Drove Off a 250 Foot Cliff”

1. If Tesla reduces traffic deaths and accidents by 60% in the USA, that’s 2-3% of GDP that’s saved annually. Stopping the bleeding of the economy is the same as growing it at the same rate. Meaning, suddenly the american economy has a growth of 2-3% extra. Good times.

2. Goos good. Because, I can’t see how FSD could be at fault if its been determined that someone purposely drove off a cliff.

   Can’t stop won’t stop idiots.
   ! ^_^

3. Good the passengers survived and the nutter could face justice or a long stay on the loony bin.

   Something worth recalling: there is no system 100% safe against lunatics.

   Wherever there are humans involved in controlling high energy systems capable of killing others, there is the risk of such disasters.

   • Also worth noting that the lowest energy system capable of killing others when in the hands of a motivated human is a rock laying on the ground.

     So completely avoiding the problem is going to be rather difficult.

4. I can personally attest that the Tesla model Y is a life saving vehicle. I was recently in a horrible fwy accident where my car was hit and spun out going over 70mph. The EMTs said I should play the lottery because it was shocking I was able to walk away with only a broken hand and sprained ankle.

5. Good thing Thelma and Louise weren’t driving a Tesla. Might of ruined the ending.

6. Something Musk, Tesla share price, cliff drop, murder suicide, something. The joke writes itself.

   • A Twitter employee put most of his savings in Tesla stocks. Then, with the money left,
     he bought a Tesla car. Then Musk acquired Twitter…

7. WTF, Peter Zeihan lays out the resource and other factor case that EVs will not be major sources of transportation for at least a decade, probably 3 decades or more, that they aren’t green when factoring in true manufacturing and electric generation costs, and that Tesla specifically is STILL massively over-valued: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf85EuQKWeQ
   He also points out that capital itself is going away as Boomers retire and put their money into bonds instead of stocks, and there is no replacement in demographically challenged generations, like his, to come.
   I respect Zeihan a lot. He may be missing some things around the edges of innovation; e.g. Lithium-Sodium batteries, the expected rise in oil prices making EVs more attractive, but do these things move the needle significantly?

   • “…Peter Zeihan lays out the resource and other factor case that EVs will not be major sources of transportation for at least a decade, probably 3 decades or more…”

     Well they have to be made, don’t they? There are, supposedly, around 1.446 billion vehicles on Earth. It’s going to take a good while to make replacements. The speed of which will depend on electric car cost and oil cost. I didn’t watch his video but did look up his ideas on electric cars and found this link which said,

     “…In “moving on from oil” we would be walking away from a complex and often-violent and always critical supply and transport system, only to replace it with at least ten more. A world in which we “electrify everything” requires an order of magnitude more copper and lithium and nickel and cobalt and graphite and chromium and zinc and rare earths and silicon and more….”

     https://zeihan.com/greentech-and-the-end-of-the-world/

     He’s wrong because he does not understand the technology nor does he understand the alternatives. We don’t need rare earth minerals. We can do without them all together. Electric motors are moving towards switched-reluctance motors.

     https://www.machinedesign.com/motors-drives/article/21826520/are-switchedreluctance-motors-for-you

     Teslas newest motor has way less rare earths and is more of a switched-reluctance motor. SRM can be made of high silicon iron and can use aluminum for conductors, so we don’t need copper in large quantities either. If the price or availability ever goes up on copper then everyone will just switch to aluminum like they use for power lines and we will never run out of iron, silicon or aluminum. We don’t need cobalt. Newer batteries use less or none. We don’t need graphite. We can make all we need if necessary.

     https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20380-0

     We can make graphene and other carbon based anodes and cathodes from carbon. It’s true that battery cost need to come down but it’s a forgone conclusion that they are. There’s been several different type batteries made for all sorts of stuff that are in great abundance. Robert Murray-Smith has made all sorts of batteries from carbon from many sources. With cheap batteries, electrical power then becomes cheap, as we can run the plants we already have at 100% capacity and store the power for charging when needed. And cheap batteries really kicks up the usefulness of solar and wind power by a huge margin. True, it will take time for this, but economic feasibility for this has been shown with Teslas battery storage bank in Australia. The whole thing paid for itself in three years. No doubt financial types paid close attention to that, and now we see more being planned. It’s cheaper to store power than to make new power plants.

     “…that they aren’t green when factoring in true manufacturing and electric generation costs…”

     I’m not going to go into why this is wrong because it would be a tome but one factor is electric cars can last longer using less resources.

     In fact there’s an even bigger resource shift away from the hydrocarbon Oligarchs coming up due to decreases in solar power cost. This guy says we are close to the cost needed to create hydrocarbons from CO2 in the air and hydrogen from water and has a company to pursue this. He has a great blog on all sorts of stuff solar and space related. I bet people who are interested in this site, which is fantastic, would also be interested in his site.

     https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/07/22/were-going-to-need-a-lot-of-solar-panels/

     • ‘…Teslas battery storage bank in Australia…. paid for itself in three years..’
       The Australian battery didn’t pay for itself with arbitration of power prices – buying low and selling high – but by providing frequency control and fast start services – which would not be needed in a grid mainly powered by systems with inertia, like coal, hydro, and nuclear. Once the power services niche is filled, there’s still an enormous gap between demand, and minimum wind and solar supply. Solar minima are obviously zero – though they don’t last as long in Australia as in most countries. Wind can be not much better, over large areas, for days. I’m currently looking at Mark Z Jacobson’s book ‘100% Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage for Everything’, but I’d give him more credence if the power sources he proposes for about 90% of the world’s power – wind and solar – had achieved anywhere near that figure, anywhere, even just for electricity, let alone the other ~80% of energy requirements. (Denmark claims over 50% of its power, but if you look at actual consumption, rather than production, over the year, it’s closer to a third.) https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DK-DK1?aggregated=false

       • To make my personal stance clear I’m in favor of ANY sort of power, coal, natural gas, especially nuclear fission and fusion, but I’m very fond of solar for national and personal independence. If solar panels get cheap enough, and it looks like they will, small fuel makers, oil or alcohol or other fuels could be used for long term storage. This would make me very happy.

         Robert Murray-Smith sold patents on graphene batteries made from carbon sources to the Edison Company. I wonder what they will do with them? Are they going to torpedo them and keep oil at a higher cost?

         I really don’t care much for big wind and their bird killing murder mills.

         • I don’t care for Big Wind for the fact that if we remove energy from wind systems to power our civilisation, it will necessarily change the climate (the wind will have less power to move rain inland, causing wetter littorals and drier interiors).

           Greenpeace and co. complain about water storage hydro flooding forests and releasing CO₂ as they rot. Why they aren’t going bananas over the environmental effect of wind farms, which is much bigger Watt for Watt, is completely baffling to me.

     • The South Australian grid battery is often explained in the low information media as used to power the state when other sources are off-line, but a simple comparison of the size (130 MWh) with the electricity needs of South Australia (1.3 GW) shows that it can only do so for about 6 minutes.
       In reality it serves to buffer and smooth out power fluctuations.

       I happened to watch Zeihan’s talk this morning, and it was clear that to him the advantage of EVs is solely in carbon dioxide reduction. No awareness of the other advantages driving both individual and government level adoptions.
       – Less pollution within cities where people live
       – Cutting off the need for oil, and the unstable parts of the world often supported by oil sales.
       – Replacing oil (expensive and volatile and often imported) with coal and gas (local, secure)

       He also said EVs were expensive. And gave the price of some. But no price for the competing ICVs they would be compared to. So I don’t know what he thought he proved there. I know personally some people who did the math for themselves and concluded a Tesla would pay for itself within a few years given their applicable electricity and petrol prices.

       Also, they are absolute MONSTER’s in a straight line. So that’s a net increase in public happiness.

     • There are two classes of reluctance motors: switched reluctance an synchronous reluctance. The Machine Design article that you reference only talks about switched reluctance. All the information presented in it is correct, AFAIK, but I wish it had covered synchronous reluctance motors as well and the tradeoffs between the two classes. Tesla motors are synchronous reluctance, not switched reluctance. They have equal numbers of rotor and stator poles, and as I understand it, are smoother and quieter than their switched reluctance cousins. They’re similar to induction motors with variable drive frequency, while switched reluctance motors are similar to stepper motors with variable stepping rates. What I don’t know is how the two compare in power to mass ratio.

8. I’ve driven over that particular stretch of road. I was wondering how they’d happened to go off the road, I don’t recall a hairpin curve, or anything of the sort.

9. ” Are Tesla cars safer?”

   Safer than what? Safer than other cars of similar year model that have safety features like e.g. lane departure warning?

   • To be fair, it was deactivated by the driver. I suspect if it had to take action to keep the vehicle on the road the computer would have steered the car back onto the road. I could be wrong though…

     • The driver can always override autopilot/FSD. Braking or moving the steering wheel disengages autopilot/FSD.

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