- So the next story I want to talk about
is a crash that happened where a woman driving a Model S
slammed into the back of a firetruck
which was stopped at a stop light a 60 miles per hour
and miraculously walked away with only a broken ankle.
It's crazy that someone was able,
was hit, basically a wall going that fast
and didn't die, didn't go shooting through the windshield,
the engine didn't come smashing,
the steering wheel didn't get pushed back.
I mean this car is completely totaled.
And it's kind of a bitter sweet thing
because what happened was the media picked this up
and made it this story about how Tesla Autopilot
and it's kinda clickbaity and lame
but really this is good story that she survived.
It just goes to the safety of this.
Now Tesla released some details about it
and because of how the media responded to this,
it's obvious that his was a very defensive kind of response.
But yeah, here you go.
So details about the cash.
The driver engaged Autosteer
and Traffic Aware Cruise Control,
collectively, commonly known as Autopilot.
Those two things together make Autopilot.
On multiple occasions during this driving cycle,
she repeatedly canceled and then reengaged these features
and regularly adjusted the vehicle's cruising speed.
So to me this is very common.
You're driving and you want to change lanes.
The auto lane change is a bit dicey at times,
especially if there's traffic or you're going fast.
I personally don't trust it that well.
So you may disengage, change lanes,
put it back on, very common.
The vehicle registered more than a dozen instances
of her hands being off the steering wheel
during this drive cycle.
On two such occasions, she had her hands off the wheel
for more than one minute each time
and her hands came back on
only after the visual alert was provided.
Each time she put her hands back on the wheel,
she took them back off the wheel after a few seconds.
Again, this is how a lot of people use the Autopilot.
Now it technically is a hands-on system
and you're not supposed to do this.
But just to be honest, to be real with you guys,
this is how must people do it.
You know to come on, you kind of jiggle the wheel
and you're done.
I like to leave my hand on the wheel
to help kind of prevent that
and also to make sure I actually have my hands on the wheel.
So yeah, you know, to each their own about how they do it.
But this is I would say to this point, common.
Now this is the part that's interesting.
About one minute and 22 seconds before crash,
she re-enabled Autosteer and Cruise Control, Autopilot
and then within two seconds,
took her hands off the steering wheel, again, common.
She did not touch the steering wheel for the next 80 seconds
until the crash happened.
This is consistent with her admission
that she was looking at her phone.
Okay, so there's two things here, two kind of no-nos.
Some two big fopas here.
That is that she was using it on a surface street.
The truck was stopped at a red light.
So you know, I'm sure you guys that have Teslas know,
these things do not work on surface streets.
I mean, technically you can enable it
but if there's a stop sign,
if there's a kid crossing the road,
if there's all these things,
it's not going to detect them and stop.
A stop light is completely meaningless
to the current version of Autopilot.
And I think it'd be a long time before it actually works.
So, that's a big no-no.
Second off, she was looking at her phone.
Even if you're on Autopilot,
you should not be looking at your phone.
You know, this is why we have voice command.
This is why we're trying to make phones
and things easier to where you can still
keep your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel
while you know, playing music, sending messages,
doing whatever it is that you would be doing
while you're looking at your phone.
So she really messed up here, right?
And unfortunately it was reported
in such a clickbaity, lame kind of way.
Elon actually responded about it.
He said "it's super messed up that a Tesla crash
resulting a broken ankle is front page news
and the 40,000 people who died in the US
auto accidents alone in the past year
get almost no coverage."
Now the reason I think this is super messed up
is that the title of it was "Tesla with Autopilot
slams into truck stopped at a red light."
That appears to be an extremely clickbaity thing.
Because what it's actually saying is Tesla with Autopilot.
At the time of posting this, they had no clue
that this car was actually in Autopilot.
Now it does kind of make sense
and I don't blame the media for making this story.
I kind of disagree with Elon.
Like when you're talking about autonomous driving cars,
these things are gonna get a lot of attention
and I think they should 'cause it'll help
create a tighter sense of scrutiny
and control to save people's lives.
I don't think it's bad necessarily that it's reported
but this title was super clickbaity and misleading
and so shame on the Washington Post for doing that
because they should be better than that.
This got me thinking though, how many people
actually die per year?
And so I looked it up on Wikipedia
and there's a cook chart here as well as a table of data
and this chart kind of made me go like this a few times,
look at it sideways because
can't make any sense of it, honestly.
But basically the story I got was that deaths
per billion vehicle miles traveled are coming down rapidly
while the population and the amount of miles traveled
are going up tremendously.
So cars are getting safer.
But it got me to the point of okay,
how many people are actually dying per hour?
And so when I did that, I took that data from there
and I just divided it essentially by the number of hours
in a year and you can see that as of 2016, we've had 4.34,
4.384 deaths every hour in the United States
from a motor vehicle.
That's kind of crazy.
That means by the time I started recording this video
to the time it posted, we've had 80 to 100 people
die from a car.
And as Elon pointed out, hardly any of those
are gonna get reported.
And you have someone that just got an ankle,
I think the story should be how safe Teslas are.
I'm curious what you guys think.
Leave me a comment down below.