Furthermore, with the amount of telemetry that those cars have The company knows whether it was in self drive or not when it went onto the track. So the fact that they didn't go public saying it wasn't means that it was in self-drive mode and they want to save the PR face and liability.

Since the story has 3 separate incidents where "the driver let their Tesla turn left onto some railroad tracks" I'm going to posit:

Teslas on self-drive mode will turn left onto railroad tracks unless forcibly restrained.

Prove me wrong, Tesla

Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't it trivial to take it out of their bullshit dangerous "FSD" mode and take control? How does a car go approximately 40-50 feet down the tracks without the driver noticing and stopping it?

I mean... I have seen some REALLY REALLY stupid drivers so I could totally see multiple people thinking they found a short cut or not realizing the road they are supposed to be on is 20 feet to the left and there is a reason their phone is losing its shit all while their suspension is getting destroyed.

But yeah. It is the standard tesla corp MO. They detect a dangerous situation and disable all the "self driving". Obviously because it is up to the driver to handle it and not because they want the legal protection to say it wasn't their fault.

The ~2010 runaway Toyota hysteria was ultimately blamed on mechanical problems less than half the time. Floor mats jamming the pedal, drivers mixing up gas/brake pedals in panic, downright lying to evade a speeding ticket, etc were cause for many cases.

Should a manufacturer be held accountable for legitimate flaws? Absolutely. Should drivers be absolved without the facts just because we don't like a company? I don't think so. But if Tesla has proof fsd was off, we'll know in a minute when they invade the driver's privacy and release driving events

Full stream ahead with the train puns

They didn't make a turn into a crossing. It turned onto the tracks.

Just to be clear for others, it did so at a crossing. That's still obviously not what it should have done and it's no defence of the self-driving feature, but I read your comment as suggesting it had found its way onto train tracks by some other route.

I'm not sure I'd be able to sleep through driving on the railroad tracks. I'm going to guess this person was simply incredibly fucking stupid, and thought the car would figure it out, instead of doing the bare fucking minimum of driving their goddamn 2 ton heavy death machine themself.

I was gonna say it’s not so much the fact that the car was hit by a train, but that it turned on to the tracks …but 40 or 50 feet?

https://youtu.be/x3LwHhDD6TY

Maybe if they use LIDAR like they should have instead of just cameras it wouldn’t be such an issue, but they’re determined to minimize costs and maximize profits at the expense of consumers as are all publicly traded companies

That, and little kids... and motorcycles... and school busses

Clearly the train didn't yield properly, time to ban trains.

I'll just fork it; we can do better than this.

Yeaaaaah, I mean fuck Tesla for a variety of reasons, but right here we're looking at a car that drove itself onto a set of train tracks, continued down the train tracks, and the people inside did...nothing? Like, they grabbed their shit and got out when it got stuck. The car certainly should not have done this, but this isn't really a Tesla problem. It'll definitely be interesting when robotaxis follow suit though.

Pretty sure this one also had a driver in it.

A family in Pennsylvania