[pessimist]

A beta that we are all helping test . Simply unbelievable that the NHTSA allows this to happen.

The Tesla safety report which the company boastfully released wouldn't have counted this incident since the Tesla itself wasn't harmed.

[jillesvangurp]

Instead of finger pointing and blaming, the fact remains that several drivers crashed into an obstacle that they weren't prepared for, did not anticipate, and could not deal with. Maybe because they were driving too fast, weren't keeping their distance as they should have, or simply weren't paying enough attention.

Stuff like this happens all the time. Pile ups on highways have been a regular thing for as long as highways have existed. The pattern is always the same: something unexpected happens in front of somebody and they fail to respond or they over react. The problem recurses behind them as more vehicles become part of the problem. It doesn't matter if the problem at the front is real or not. The actual problem is that drivers further back are not prepared for a thing that should be considered something that can happen at any time.

The car in front of you might have all sorts of reasons to suddenly slam the brakes. You have no way of telling when they will do that because they are blocking your view to what's in front. There might be an unseen obstacle, engine failure, fog, a hole in the road, whatever. You have no way of telling until the brake lights in front of you come on. It doesn't actually matter why they slam their brakes or whether there even is a good reason for them to do that. You have to be ready for that eventuality and the appropriate response is going to be slamming your own brakes. And the car behind you had better be ready for that too.

Obviously we had a cascading failure of multiple drivers not being ready for that here. And they are dodging their own responsibility by pointing to the problem in front of them instead of the idiot behind them, or themselves. The second car obviously wasn't the problem as they avoided crashing into the Tesla. Good job. The Tesla is fine. It was the driver behind them that was the real problem.

The irony of human failures like this is that taking them out of the loop might make things safer. The Tesla stopped. It doesn't matter why. Human drivers behind it failed to act. Would that have happened if they all had FSD on or would we just have had a weird traffic jam occurring for no good reason at all? That too happens all the time.