It’s interesting to see clear hallmarks of a Tesla “driverless” design failure, but the police didn’t officially report the crash as a Tesla.
Newbury Fire was dispatched at 12:05 a.m. Thursday to I-95 northbound near exit 81 for a report of a two-vehicle crash. Upon arrival, rescuers found two passenger cars had crashed head-on on the highway. […] During the response and rescue efforts, it was apparent that one motorist was traveling southbound, the wrong way, in the northbound lane when the crash occurred.
What they mean to say is how apparent it is that Tesla software engineering failed catastrophically. Other reports highlight how emergency responders took a wait and see approach to a wrong-way driver, which always is a bad idea with a Tesla due to the “driverless” factor.
The Tesla was first spotted going the wrong way on I-95 by New Hampshire State Police. “Massachusetts State Troopers from Troop A and the New Hampshire State Police maintained visual contact with the wrong-way vehicle through the Newburyport area while law enforcement prepared a tire-deflation device in Georgetown,” Massachusetts State Police spokesman Tim McGuirk said in a statement. “Before the wrong way vehicle reached the device, the Tesla struck a Chevrolet Trailblazer at mile marker 81.5 in Newbury.”
Struck is an understatement.
More like obliterated.
The police holding back to monitor the Tesla presumably watched as it slammed head-on into a Chevy SUV, killing another police officer on his way home for Thanksgiving.
Notably, we saw in the report months ago from Utah how a quick thinking officer immediately crashed his cruiser into a wrong-way Tesla to prevent any loss of life. It seems NH and MA didn’t get the memo (let alone look at the data). In this case the wait and see method predictably ended up in tragedy, like the hundreds of Tesla crashes that are rapidly accelerating (a rate reaching 5X the number of Tesla being made).
