This is horrifying. A manual window breaking device that is part of the interior of the car should be standard by now. It wouldn’t be that difficult to design. This is not a Tesla exclusive problem.
There seems to be a lot of conflicting info on this for example the Tesla model and what exactly caused it to go into the water. Either way, make sure that your vehicle is going the direction you desire before you start moving fast enough to cause an issue.
although, this probably wouldn’t have happened if the user had physical feedback to feel whether the shifter moved how they wanted it to or not. Fuck tesla. The rescue crews also had issues with getting into the tesla that wouldn’t have happened on most vehicles.
There is, you just have to find it while the car sinks or the flames spread. It’s not the normal button that a user might be accustomed to pushing to get out so they might not know where it is and finding it in time might be the difference between life and death. For front doors it’s usually a lever somewhere but in some model Ys and the cybertruck the rear door release is hidden. under a mat in the door recess.
So anyway, let’s say you have a story and one minute of the story the character is driving peacefully to get to Walmart, but 60 seconds later she is in her Tesla completely submerged making a phone call. Maybe searching what to do via Goo… duck duck go. Wouldn’t it be interesting for the reader to know a little bit more about the story?
For example, what was she wearing? Was her mechanic’s name Frank or Dave? Was the water cold? What did she need at Walmart anyway?
Forget about the part of how the car actually made it into the water. What about the part where it started sinking? Did it sink slowly? Nose first? Did she know that the sand on your shoes could fracture the glass if it had hard enough material? Again, let’s not even talk about how the Tesla went from the road to underwater… pretty obvious…a gigantic alien picked it up and tossed it in the water.
This is one of the reasons I am hesitant to get any “digital car”. I’ve read that government has backdoors to turn off engine or otherwise control cars.
The real threat is foreign bad actors. There’s a global database that maps all VINs.
How many Americans have connected cars? How many are in garages? How many will not smell the exhaust before it kills them when every car in the country is started one night?
That’s WMD
Source: I used to meet with the CISOs of all the global auto manufacturers annually. If you’re a light sleeper, don’t work in infosec.
interesting idea for what really amounts to a terrorist attack. any others? i figure you may have some other cool ones
personally, i’m more scared of our government in most cases. of course, foreign bad actors can and will do damage but over the long term the government, should it morph into something a bit more authoritarian than it is today, would have much more incentive and capability to do harmful things
i remember there was some leak nearly a decade ago already that showed NSA can access all smart TVs. some TVs even have microphones so that they can listen to what’s going on in your living room. Makes you wonder if Orwell was a time traveler
I was a pretty big punk rock anarchist conspiracy theorist from my preteens through my early 20s. Now I work in the field. IMHO the US’ version (not the GOP’s) of world order, is the least scary. And with these psychos threatening murder and shit, the SOTU rebuttal about knee deep in blood… I’ve come to accept whatever dumb shit I or anyone I know is doing online, the govt doesn’t give a shit. But as a FOSS nerd and EFF-donating privacy advocate, I feel you. My real fear is bad actors leveraging and extorting people.
As far as other examples… Just imagine every single thing you know is connected, is under attack 100% of every day in every direction. Way before the current tension, the US has been in cyber warfare with Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, etc. Right now they’re all trying to steal each other’s classified data. Some off the books guys might be actively trying to meltdown a nuclear plant. The world is your oyster. Whatever you can imagine, it’s happening. That’s why those Industry meetups I attended exist. Lookup ISAC. Automotive, finance, healthcare, manufacturing… Every vertical has an org where the security leadership exchanges best practices in spite of corporate competition, “bc the bad guys are sharing tips, so why shouldn’t we?”
I think you’re talking about PRISM? Iirc they had a pipe directly from the Bell/At&t Telco building at the Brooklyn bridge but that could have been hearsay. But I’d argue he was just a historian, not a futurist. It’s always been the same. Just different tools.
Fear mechanisms sure are effective. It took a real long time to get to where people don’t put all their trust into the imaginary extradimensional space wizard. The comfort is that we’re mortal, and those fuckheads WILL DIE eventually.
The horror of someone who believes deeply in eternity realizing in the very last moment of existence that there is no eternity, no nothing in fact, after this moment isn’t a fitting punishment for a villain?
IDK. Annihilation is not frightening. I will not be awake to experience it. The only frightening thing is that it’s hard to conceptualize not existing so you default to the nearest thing you can imagine which is a black void or being trapped in a coffin.
I cross many lines people consider ethical out of my hatred for them. There is no good and evil naturally, just what we create, and I have an admittedly unhealthy bottomless wellspring of hatred for the billionaire class. There’s no “enough”, not by any means, to satisfy the totality of the ill intent I wish upon them.
There is no good and evil naturally, just what we create
Which is love, which may wear scary forms, but it is always what gives us the power to sustain as beings through the fucking constant pain of suffering and injustice both within and without.
A four-minute drive is like a 20-minute walk. If it was really that cold, I may have done the same thing.
The way you portray it, “it says everything,” is not fair - and yes, I know we’re talking about a billionaire. Like, she deserved to die because she didn’t want to walk in the cold.
Her death shouldn’t have happened the way it did. And again, yes, I know she’s a billionaire, fuck billionaires, etc etc. But her mistake was her not being careful while driving, and potentially the car not being safe enough (e.g. doors jam-locked?)
It’s 100% Tesla’s fault. Mechanical way to open doors is not obvious and hidden, sometimes all together missing. And car relies on power to open the door, which runs out when submerged. Shit car with shit ideas. There’s a reason why windows easily shatter on cars and Musk and his cult followers seem to think getting out of car in case of emergency is less important than sounding cool.
Swiping up to drive is the same direction as tap up to reverse from a previous model Tesla. Kind of like how trackpads and mouse scroll wheels work in opposite directions. I can see how it’s not so intuitive if the direction contradicts 35 years of muscle memory.
Okay but a door that just works is going to be easier to get open before water pressure makes that impossible. Also, once there’s enough water in the car, a mechanical door will open just fine. At which point you swim for it in the opposite direction the car is moving.
Over here, ice roads are opened on typical winters on several smaller bays. The instruction to drivers is:
don’t wear a seatbelt
if ice breaks, open your door swiftly (get out first, then think about calling people)
if you can’t open the door, lower your window swiftly
if you can’t lower the window, break it (the side window, not the windshield - a windshield is multilayer laminate, too strong to break quickly)
Typically, if a car sinks on an ice road, people are likely to get out. A crank-operated window is handy in such a case. But regardless of instruction, sometimes folks do die. :(
In general, I would not like to experience any sort of extreme incident in an over-engineered car. I’d prefer something from the 1970-ties, but with airbags.
Pressure takes a while to build up and you generally can open the door before car sinks enough, it’s been tested. But even if you had to wait for car to fill with water, pressure would equalize then and you’d have no issues opening the door. Of course, you need to keep calm to use all of those tricks but car taking them away from you just increases risk of something like that happening.
I agree with the sentiment that we shouldn’t be praising people’s deaths, but I want to point out the cold part
Texas Hill Country loosely covers an area around Fredricksburg Texas with San Antonio and Austin being just on the outskirts. Looking back at the weather reports, and not knowing the exact location, the temperature on 2/10 was a low of 45-65 degrees F. Considering the lows typically come in in the late hours of the night the more realistic temperature was somewhere between 50-75 degrees F.
Also, you can see the picture of the ranch in the article which also says it’s a 900 acre ranch. 900 acres is only 1.4 sq miles. It’s one thing to say a 4 min drive at 35 mph vs walking, but realistically it’s a lot slower speed and thus a lot shorter walk.
Point taken, but regardless, it still doesn’t merit some rando say “Driving instead of walking because it’s cold? It says everything - NO WONDER she died!!!” It’s a silly thing to conclude.
Yes, if it’s cold, I will often make a 4-minute drive instead of walking 20 minutes from my guest house to my main house on my own property. It’s so relatable to most Americans!
You just want to bash billionaires, and I’ve already addressed that in my original comment. If you don’t want to understand my point, that’s on you. Stop with the strawman arguments.
Cold, in Texas? I mean, I’m sure it gets cold, but it’s not Canada and people go on 20min walks in the dead of winter with their dogs there. Awful way to die, no question.
Someone living in Siberia may say “cold in Canada? Silly geese.”
I come from a tropical climate in which people wear jackets when it’s 21 C (31 C being the average all year round.) In my mind, 21 degrees Celsius (about 68 F I think) was damn cold.
Of course, I now laugh about that.
But I won’t judge her for not wanting to be cold and using a maybe seemingly reasonable way to do that.
You should look at Northern Arizona. Southern Arizona is really hot and then Northern Arizona is high plains that can rival Canada for snow every few years. (Fun fact, when they were wondering where all the snow was for the Vancouver Olympics? It was in Arizona, we stole it fair and square!)
My first trip to Florida from Ohio I was on a tour at Kennedy Space Center. When I got there I noticed all the people in jackets, it was 65F, I was perplexed. Now the opposite is also true, I hate weather over 80F, too dang hot.
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