this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
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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.

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[–] RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 69 points 6 days ago (6 children)

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.

[–] ZMonster@lemmy.world 27 points 6 days ago (6 children)

There's absolutely a reason to not engineer something you're not required to. It's called capitalism. Tesla cut every corner they could.

[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 18 points 6 days ago (2 children)

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

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[–] Thedogdrinkscoffee@lemmy.ca 14 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Elon : some of you will die, but that is a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

[–] ZMonster@lemmy.world 4 points 6 days ago

Luigi: lol same

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[–] Scrollone@feddit.it 23 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Also, the fact that they removed Lidar sensors and just base their self driving on cameras is plainly stupid.

[–] Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 5 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] DistrictSIX@lemmy.zip 12 points 6 days ago (12 children)

That's not really the case, as Elon's already admitted that there are at least about a half a million Teslas with old HW3 self driving computers that need to have them upgraded to HW4 for them to have the chance at eventually get the FSD the buyers were promised. That's not even mentioning the upgraded cameras the HW4 vehicles have gotten. The reason for Musk not wanting lidar on Teslas is very simple: cost. He thinks it's too expensive and unnecessary, unlike every single other manufacturer working on the same problem.

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[–] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 42 points 6 days ago

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.

[–] medem@lemmy.wtf 15 points 5 days ago

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.

[–] NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 39 points 6 days ago

You can choose not to drive bleeding edge technology, but sadly you have no choice in whether to share the road with it.

[–] mhague@lemmy.world 16 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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?

[–] MajorasMaskForever@lemmy.world 7 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] innermachine@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago

The guilty don't feel guilty, they learn not to. Easy to sleep at night when u can stuff ur pillow with 100's.

[–] firepenny@lemmy.world 25 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] deathbird@mander.xyz 17 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Move fast and break things, but it's a passenger vehicle on a public road.

[–] itsprobablyfine@sh.itjust.works 15 points 6 days ago

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

[–] WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today 3 points 5 days ago

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.

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