Slashdot Mirror
Father of Driver In Violent Tesla Crash Blames Sedan's 'Rocket-Ship' Acceleration (autoweek.com)
"A Tesla crash that resulted in the deaths of the driver and a passenger in Indianapolis last November is drawing new controversy after the father of one of the victims made comments regarding the role of the Model S in the incident," Autoweek reports. "The crash occurred in downtown Indianapolis on Nov. 3, 2016, with the Model S driven by 27-year-old Casey Speckman striking a tree and catching fire. Speckman was pronounced dead at the scene while her passenger, 44-year-old Kevin McCarthy, succumbed to his injuries after being taken to the hospital." From the report: A report released last week by the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department disclosed that Speckman had a blood-alcohol level of 0.21, almost three times the legal limit in the state of Indiana, The Indianapolis Star reports. Another new detail has emerged since the violent crash was first reported: The Tesla could have been been trying to maneuver around a vehicle traveling on the wrong side of the street, suggested by closed-circuit footage obtained by the attorney of the driver's father, Jon Speckman. The coroner's report cited blunt-force injuries caused by the crash as the causes of death for both victims, noting the vehicle's fire as a contributing factor, according to The Indianapolis Star. Jon Speckman recently made comments to the newspaper blaming the acceleration of the Tesla Model S. "Had she been in another vehicle, she would have been alive for me to yell at her for driving after drinking," Speckman told The Indianapolis Star in an interview at his attorney's office. "This is a vehicle that travels from 0 to 60 in 3.1 seconds," Speckman also said during the interview. "She's clearly having to swerve to miss a vehicle going the wrong way on a one-way street. If her foot should happen to hit the accelerator, it's like a rocket ship. I don't know why they have to make a car that does that."
I don't think the Tesla forced her to drive.
If you dont want a car that accelerates quickly dont buy a car that accelerates quickly.
Alternative headline: father explains parenting strategy for raising irresponsible children.
"The key is to blame others," he said.
"Had she been in another vehicle, she would have been alive for me to yell at her for driving after drinking"
LMFTFY
"Had she been drinking under the legal limit, she would have been alive AND still had her vehicle"
Count your blessings your daughter only murdered one passenger, and not more innocent bystanders.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Yup, the cause was a drunk driver not how fast the car accelerated. Could of done the same thing in any car.
...as much as I'd like to strongly disagree with him, I'm simply not going to go after something a parent says after losing a child. No matter how dumb or self-destructive the child was, etc.
That person is grasping at whatever straws they can to maintain their sanity. They're out of bounds.
Now, I would take to task the editor(s) of the Indianapolis Star for printing that shit. At a certain point, morally, one would have to say "You know, maybe that doesn't need to be in our article."
-Styopa
I take it he's campaigning for the reinstatement of the red flag law. Seriously how fast does he think cars should be allowed to travel of accelerate? If all were limited to 20mph then almost all accidents would be survivable (though daresay you'd get some drunk idiots driving into rivers or off cliffs even at that speed).
"...A report released last week by the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department disclosed that Speckman had a blood-alcohol level of 0.21, almost three times the legal limit "
As a parent, I cannot imagine the grief this father is dealing with right now, but I certainly I hope this lapse of common sense in a desperate attempt to blame the car is temporary, given this report released by Captain Obvious.
Unfortunately, the cars performance is not the main factor that caused a loss of life. One must not only be sober, but capable of handling a car that can deliver Fast and Furious performance. While I don't agree with this stupid and pointless race to ludicrous speed in the EV market right now, if you can't handle a car, then don't drive the fucking thing, no matter what technology is powering it.
Maybe her foot wouldn't have hit the accelerator if she wasn't drunk.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Blame yourself. Every single day of the rest of your life blame yourself.
Or blame your daughter for drunk driving. Or even better, don't bother (she's dead). Just grieve, accept that shit happens, and accept that throwing blame around doesn't really fix anything in this case.
No, we should not expect distraught parents to STFU after a child dies. We should expect reporters to leave them alone and not take statements at such a trying time when they aren't thinking clearly. In this case, he gets swarmed because there was a Tesla involved. Had it been any other vehicle, he would have been left alone to say whatever irrational things might come out of any distraught parent's mouth after death of a child.
The reporters should STFU and leave the guy alone.
It is of course totally evil how Tesla forces wealthy 27-year-olds to buy massively overpowered cars for $100000, then forces them to get completely drunk, and then forces them to get behind the wheel and endanger other drivers! The humanity! There ought to be a law to protect the people from such evil corporations! /sarc
The way the courts work, if there are N causes for an accident, all N causes are liable for full 100% of the damages. This is a necessary consequence of allowing limited liability corporations. If we assign liability proportionally, immediately all corporations will spawn child corporations that will all act as one way valve. Profits flow upstream and liability stops with them. So they will not have the assets to pay for the damages they cause. It is already happening to some extent, in taxes, income stream management, and a few other areas.
But the way the system is gamed, no one seems to benefit, other than the trial lawyers.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Woah. I felt like this was way passed the line. Blaming a grieving father for words that come from a place we can only hope we will never understand is pretty lame. There's few things in life you get a pass on, but the death of a child is certainly one of those things. Relax.
What, are you wanting ethics in journalism now? We haven't had that for a long while.
Agreed, and is he suing the bar that served the drinks? Or perhaps the drink manufacturers themselves. After all if they hadn't made and sold the booze, she wouldn't have drank so much that she couldn't react safely to the wrong-way driver.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
I feel bad for the father, but blaming the car his daughter was driving at 0.21 BAC is a non-starter. I don't care if it was a Pinto and she was going 80MPH in reverse when she hit the tree causing it to burst into flames.
It's not even clear that she'd be alive in a different car leaving him to "yell at her". Thankfully, the only person she murdered was someone stupid enough to get in the car with her.
If this progresses to a lawsuit against Tesla (which is not a company I have a lot of positive feelings for), it'll be another example of why we can't have anything nice. Stupid people seem intent on making the rest of society pay for their stupidity and we keep letting them, instead of letting them suffer the sometimes fatal consequences on their own.
In Germany the limit is 0.05; she was 4x this level.
Appears Mr. Speckman had a lawyer lined up before he talked to the press. The news article (an exclusive) reads more like well-coached groundwork for a product-liability lawsuit than the outburst of a grieving distraught parent after the senseless, needless (and self-inflicted) death of a child.
Not only did the guy buy the Tesla knowing full well what its capabilities were, he let his kiddo borrow it.
He didn't buy the car, and neither did his daughter. The Tesla belonged to the passenger, who was also drunk. This is in TFA (why do I bother?). Not hard to visualize what probably happened: "I'm drunk; why don't you drive?" "Oh, wow, I've never driven one of these before; this will be fun!"
While it would be likely in this Tesla crash, in Walker's crash there was another aggravating factor: aged tires. Nine-year-old tires on a high-performance car are a recipe for disaster.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
Norway has had 0.02 as the legal limit for _many_ years now, this basically means that you cannot drive after a single half liter of beer, glass of wine or a shot of whisky.
I.e. all driving after drinking is drunk driving. BTW, when Norway introduced a legal driving limit in 1936, it was the first country in the world to do so:
http://www.promille.no/promill...
This web site (in Norwegian) shows the current rules: 0.02 to 0.05% leads to a fine of 1.5 months worth of your gross salary (or average income if you're a stock broker or similar), which means that it can get very expensive indeed when if the driver is a rich idiot. (Those fines are for when you are stopped without any accident, in a crash they will go up and your insurance won't cover anything.)
At 0.12%, i.e. 50% over the US limit, you are looking at at least 21 days in prison on top of that huge fine.
We have a lot more Teslas per capita here than in any other country but I haven't heard of a single drunk driving incident so far.
"Fast cars don't kill people, bad drivers kill people."
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"