Looks like the truck had a truncated view of the car because of a grade.<p><a href="http://imgur.com/a/lFRgf" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/a/lFRgf</a><p>Elon says the radar ignores what it thinks are overhead signs.<p><a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/748625979271045121" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/748625979271045121</a><p>More discussion:<p><a href="https://m.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/4qnu4a/a_tragic_loss/" rel="nofollow">https://m.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/4qnu4a/a_tragic_...</a>
"The top of Joshua Brown’s 2015 Tesla Model S vehicle was torn off by the force of the collision. The truck driver, Frank Baressi, 62, Tampa was not injured in the crash.
The FHP said the tractor-trailer was traveling west on US 27A in the left turn lane toward 140th Court. Brown’s car was headed east in the outside lane of U.S. 27A.
When the truck made a left turn onto NE 140th Court in front of the car, the car’s roof struck the underside of the trailer as it passed under the trailer. The car continued to travel east on U.S. 27A until it left the roadway on the south shoulder and struck a fence. The car smashed through two fences and struck a power pole. The car rotated counter-clockwise while sliding to its final resting place about 100 feet south of the highway. Brown died at the scene.
Charges are pending."<p>source: <a href="https://www.levyjournalonline.com/police-beat.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.levyjournalonline.com/police-beat.html</a><p>given the above, I suspect that even if the Model S' brakes kicked in, they still would not have saved him. Unless the driver was asleep at the wheel or otherwise distracted.
> The first paragraph notes that this was Tesla’s first known autopilot death in some 130 million miles driven by its customers. “Among all vehicles in the US, there is a fatality every 94 million miles,” the company then notes.<p>This statistic is a bit disingenuous, since the 1 fatality every 94 million miles is across all road types, where as Tesla's autopilot is only used for highway driving, mile for mile the safest way to drive.
This is why i'm skeptical of tesla rushing out autonomous features. i think augmented driving being confused by customers as fully autonomous is extremely dangerous. teslas rush to market and resulting accidents could set back the whole industry.<p>I also don't understand how tesla can make the leap to fully autonomous vehicles learning/using training data from the semi-autonomous vehicles that are in the customers hands? google has driven 1.5 million miles fully autonomously (with some human oversight) on city streets how many has tesla?<p>another thought: if tesla does get to fully autonomous vehicles... wouldn't that destroy their sales? its generally agreed upon the demand for car ownership decreases dramatically with self driving vehicles. maybe theyre not afraid to cannibalize themselves akin to apple?
Brad Templeton argues a perpendicular truck would look stationary to radar and be filtered out, so use LIDAR.<p><a href="http://ideas.4brad.com/man-dies-while-driven-tesla-autopilot" rel="nofollow">http://ideas.4brad.com/man-dies-while-driven-tesla-autopilot</a>