1) The witness and barely-surviving passenger in a Tesla very clearly stated (based on 911 dispatch recordings and interviews) that the owner had FSD controlling the car when it crashed and killed him.
Rossiter, who survived the crash, told emergency responders that von Ohain was using an “auto-drive feature on the Tesla” that “just ran straight off the road”…
2) The same witness said FSD had been in use on the trip just before the fatal crash, and noted that it had been repeatedly making unsafe movements requiring quick interventions.
3) The dead owner’s widow also stated the victim was convinced as an employee of Elon Musk that FSD should be trusted all the time and every time the car was operated… for safety.
Von Ohain used Full Self-Driving nearly every time he got behind the wheel, Bass said, placing him among legions of Tesla boosters heeding Musk’s call to generate data and build the technology’s mastery. While Bass refused to use the feature herself — she said its unpredictability stressed her out — her husband was so confident in all it promised that he even used it with their baby in the car. […] “Now it feels like we were just guinea pigs.”
[…] “Once Hans passed away and time went by, there wasn’t any more discussion about him,” said the former employee, a member of von Ohain’s team who soon resigned. To von Ohain’s widow, Tesla’s silence seemed almost cruel. Though the company eventually helped cover the cost of her move back home to Ohio, Bass said, Tesla’s first communication with the family after the crash was a termination notice she found in her husband’s email.
These three points come through clearly in a new Washington Post article about the late Hans von Ohain, a former Tesla employee.
Tesla owners have long complained of occasionally erratic behavior by the cars’ software, including sudden braking, missed road markings and crashes with parked emergency vehicles. Since federal regulators began requiring automakers to report crashes involving driver-assistance systems in 2021, they have logged more than 900 in Teslas. A Post analysis found at least 40 crashes that resulted in serious or fatal injuries.
[…]
As Rossiter yelled for help on the deserted mountain road, he remembers, his friend was screaming inside the burning car.
Allegedly the Tesla Model 3 FSD software “veered” off a Colorado road straight into a tree without braking. Although von Ohain survived the crash, emergency responders and his friend watched him trapped and burned alive, typical for Tesla crashes.
Check out Tesladeaths.com if you want to track the rapidly mounting Tesla death toll.
And watch this.
If the CEO of General Motors were out there acting like a drug-addled Holocaust-denying far-right, chime-in-on-everything, Twitter-destroying gadfly, I would never consider even getting in a GM car. I don’t know how people look past Musk’s observable behavior and buy these cars.
Now, ain’t this the same “von Ohain” bunch tied to that rich Nazi relative who fancied himself a spy, peekin’ and pokin’ at the Brits, swiping Whittle’s jet engine patent (back in ’30) and handin’ it over to ol’ Hitler? And would you believe it, after the dust settled in WWII, they go and hire him as the top dog scientist for the USAF!
Air and Space Forces
and
Ain’t von Ohain just slicker than a greased swine at a county fair? Swore allegiance to them Nazis, did all their dirty deeds, then turned around and scrubbed himself clean as a whistle. You reckon he whipped up that PhD faster than a prairie fire with no clue about the subject, all ’cause he wasn’t lounging on a throne of Nazi intel on Whittle next to pile of Nazi gold bars?
That fella there, he’s the one who oughta been burnin’ in a wildfire. Shame on America for givin’ that Nazi a free pass and sweepin’ his sins under the rug. But let’s not forget, this young von Ohain maybe related, didn’t fall too far from that rotten tree neither.
@Rusty you make an excellent point I’ve not seen elsewhere. 1933 “idea” and 1935 “publication” of a young student tracks directly to Hitler egregiously stealing from and copying the British to create the Luftwaffe. Perhaps useful to remember in 1933 there were plenty of British sympathizers with Hitler, especially “high society” types mingling with the von Ohain family. Physics research probably had a funnel straight out of Cambridge into Göttingen.