Dutchman Dies in Tesla Crash; Firefighters Feared Electrocution (reuters.com)

A Dutchman died on Wednesday after his Tesla collided with a tree, according to local authorities, and it took firefighters hours to remove his body from the vehicle due to fears they could be electrocuted. Reuters reports: The cause of the crash on a highway about 40 kilometers east of Amsterdam was not known. Photos of the crash scene published by local media showed the back of the car mostly intact but its front smashed in and parts strewn about. Tesla said it was "working with the authorities to establish the facts of the incident" and would publish its findings as soon as they were available. A spokeswoman said it was not known whether the car was using "autopilot", Tesla's driving assistance technology, at the time of the crash, and that would form part of the investigation. A fatal crash of a Tesla Model S in the United States earlier this year knocked the company's shares and raised concerns about whether automated driving technology was being released to consumers safely.

Comments

Great firefighters

[Dunbal]

It's not like your house or building is hooked up to the power mains when they fight fires there - no risk of electrocution at all. /sarcasm

Re: Great firefighters

[sunking2]

I don't want to pay firefighters to be trained in a car that .000001% of the populace has. There is much more beneficial training to be had.

News reporting creates cognitive biases

[l2718]

We have a fundamental problem: our brains tend to confuse the availability and prevalence of information about something with the prevalence of the underlying event.

Here, the news is reporting on every serious Tesla crash, creating the false impression that these are dangerous cars -- we aren't seeing a report on every Corolla crash, say.

I think the same bias plays into current panic over child abductions, which is distorting evaluation of common parenting strategies like letting kids play by themselves: it's not that abductions today are more common in the past, but that today's media is much better equipped to discover and wildly and rapidly disseminate information about them.

Electrocution wasn't the reason

[guruevi]

The reason was because the car was engulfed in flames and the occupant was already dead. It's not like they didn't extinguish the fire or let the occupant die. You can use large amounts of water to extinguish Lithium battery fires (removing both heat and oxygen) and these batteries are dry, not pure liquid lithium. This would be similar for a gas powered car if the gas tank is engulfed, fire fighters won't risk recovering corpses or property if there is a substantial risk of an explosion.

Re:Frist to come must shut power down

[Frobnicator]

They know what to do with modern vehicles. I understand the rush to be a first poster rather than actually reading the article.

If you had actually read the article you would have seen:

... since firefighters were certain the victim had died immediately after the crash, it did not make sense for rescue workers to take unneeded risks in recovering his body.