A Tesla started driving the wrong way on a highway just after midnight and crashed head-on into oncoming traffic, killing two.
Rescuers were able to pull the victim, 22-year-old Placentia resident Jeremy Breen, from his Mitsubishi Lancer, said Officer Javier Navarro, a CHP spokesman. But he was pronounced dead about 25 minutes later, the Riverside County Coroner’s Office said. The other driver, in a Tesla Model 3, could not be rescued, Navarro said. That driver was not publicly identified. Both drivers were traveling alone. Investigators were trying to determine where the Tesla entered the freeway and why it was headed in the wrong direction, Navarro said.
The incident reminds me of Canada, where an official statement condemned Tesla for putting society at risk with poorly engineered low-quality cars operated with predictable disregard for laws.
ICBC released a statement Tuesday afternoon saying that the incident captured on video by a Richmond News reader – which showed a driverless Tesla coasting on the wrong side of the road in Richmond Centre – is not permitted under B.C. laws. …it doesn’t appear as if the owner in question on Monday afternoon read the instructions properly, as the driverless car entered the lot on the complete wrong side of an intersection and continued for at least 50 yards on the wrong side of the road.
There have been many, many examples posted of Tesla choosing the wrong side of a road to drive on. It’s a horrible reality of a company that doesn’t seem to care at all about the extremely high risk they pose to human life.
Here’s a five-year old clarion warning from greentheonly in 2018, where the Tesla “vision” had two sides of a yellow line and chose the obviously wrong side. On a dangerously blind hill, while still thinking it was on the other side (see lower left diagram), the Tesla launches into an oncoming traffic lane.
This research was picked up and became more widely known in 2019 by attention-seeking “hackers” who gave a conference presentation on why and how greentheonly was right.
…the Autopilot system will [misread lines, become overconfident and] make an abnormal judgement, which causes the vehicle to enter into the reverse lane
It wasn’t theoretical, however. A conference wasn’t necessary. Wrong-way Tesla were in 2019 news for real risks on real roads.
The CHP said multiple reports came in of the vehicle going the wrong way — eastbound in westbound lanes — on Interstate Highway 80 near Fremont Street at 2:46 a.m.. The suspect, who wasn’t identified, continued the full length of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, through the toll plaza and onto northbound Interstate Highway 880, where a CHP spike strip stopped him around Fifth Avenue in Oakland, police said. The driver is in custody, and the CHP is investigating what prompted the wrong-way driving.
What prompted wrong-way driving? Tesla design failures with culpable negligence seems to be the simple answer.
Sadly by 2021 these warnings still did not stop Tesla from pushing its unsafe cars onto public roads, as documented by the NHTSA.
I tried to turn the wheel to avoid it from going into the wrong lane but the car by itself took control and forced itself into the incorrect lane
Fixed yet? Apparently NOT.
Two more people are dead.