As
we reported yesterday, his brother claims he'd complained about the car veering at this spot 7 or 8 times. Now, Tesla claims otherwise, and I wasn't there to know whether this was
really what was communicated, but if it was, it strikes me as odd that he would not be holding the wheel anticipating the possible veer.
Yes, that's one of the things that jumped out at me.
If, as the victim's brother claims, AutoSteer had failed several times at that exact place on the highway, and nearly caused an accident multiple times, then any reasonable person would have at the very least kept his hands on the wheel when driving past the spot. Speaking as a computer programmer, it seems to me that an Apple engineer, who would supposedly have been more aware of the limitations of the AutoSteer controlling software than the average person, would be more likely to turn off AutoSteer before that point, and not turn it back on until past that section of road.
The fact that the driver, according to Tesla's data logs, was not touching the steering wheel for at least 6 seconds prior to the accident, leads me to think there are two likely possibilities:
1. That the driver had fallen asleep, or was in some way physically or mentally incapacitated at the time. (I hate to suggest he might have been drunk, since we have no indication at all of that, but that is a frequent contributor to accidents.)
2. The brother may have been at least exaggerating when he said that the victim had had the same problem at the same place numerous times before. Even if we set aside the possibility that the brother was "improving the story" to improve the chances for being awarded a lot of money in a wrongful death lawsuit, there is the natural human tendency to "remember" things after the event rather differently than we perceived them at the time. For example, when someone says "Oh, I just
knew that something bad was going to happen!" ...Well, almost certainly they didn't have any feeling at the time strong enough to be described as "knowing" something bad would happen. Maybe they had a feeling of unease on previous occasions, and after the fact they "remembered" that as happening right before the event, and in their grief in the aftermath, "remembered" the feeling of unease or worry as being much stronger than it actually had been.
In this case, perhaps it's more that the survivor remembered his brother complaining that AutoSteer seemed to be malfunctioning, and that he had taken it in for service to deal with the problem. Maybe it wasn't that AutoSteer had actually "tried to" run the car into that same concrete barrier multiple times before.
* * * * *
Hopefully I don't need to point out that all this is mere speculation on my part.
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