NHTSA opens Thirty-Seventh Tesla crash
probe after couple from California were
killed when their Model 3 smashed into
back of Walmart truck in Florida, with
impact shearing car's roof off

You couldn't give me a Tesla.

Big rigs and trailers all have a built-in crash guard on the back of them. It is heavy reinforced steel welded up and has a cross member at the level of where the bumper of a car is. So when a vehicle hits and makes an impact it will stop it from going under the trailer or truck. From the photo, it looks like possibly the guard was sheared off and the car went right through it. Or perhaps there wasn't one there.

"Its female driver, aged 66, and her 67 year-old male passenger were killed. The pair were visiting from Lompoc in California, and neither their age nor their relationship to one another has been disclosed" Huh? That Tesla was doing a lot according to the article. Was the couple alive or asleep?

THIS is why Musk shut down the location where they design and program the "autopilot" function of these vehicles. Way too much of a technology stretch. And I'll bet that some "smart guys" swore to him that they could make it work perfectly "in five years" or something like that. Old saying in the business I worked in, the most advanced weapons systems on Earth......"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be Research & Development". humorous, yes, but a Very important point of fact, too. The Tesla "autopilot" function kills people. It cannot safely drive the car in all conditions, and people think that it can. The ENTIRE concept of self-driving cars is just as bankrupt, overrated, overhyped, and BS as everything else the Left believes in. This is the kind of insanity that the WEF "geniuses" are certain will be making the basis for their dangerous, totalitarian "Great Reset". I spent 40 years being paid to do the highest levels of engineering simulation with some of the biggest, most powerful computers on the planet. I learned what computers can predict, calculate, and deal with and what they can NOT. I can tell you that the whole AI story is BS, and does NOT work. They can't get up to what a cockroach can do with it's microbrain. A good friend and coworker for a decade was a REAL computer programming genius. He felt that neural networks might have a chance to make AI actually work. But....after a number of years, and a number of Billion$ spent, pretty much all neural network research has dead ended and been abandoned. The concept that there will be a computer system that will safely drive a car in "any ordinary traffic, any ordinary street" is decades AT LEAST away. If they want to try to do something REAL along those lines, specific sections of uncomplicated interstate highways, like parts of I-80 in Nebraska and I-70 in Kansas could be carefully studied and modified to avoid "complexity" and "irregularity" which computers CANNOT deal with, and you could have a section of Certified Road, and a Certified Auto that could run from say, Salina to Goodland on I-70 safely, in a few years, I believe. The system would have to have interlocks to prevent it from even attempting anything but a "Certified Road" section. These wef-driving geniuses have bitten off WAY more than current sensors, programming methods and computing resources can deal with .....the idea of just driving in traffic on "any old road". NOT possible any time soon, and now Musk sees that, too.

Re #3, in the last paragraph....that should be "self0 driving geniuses".

There is a list of things that I would like to have but a car that drives itself is not one of them. If you want to sit and look out the window, take a bus.

It's my belief that without proper periodic maintenance (probably scheduled by Tesla but which few will adhere to), there is SO MUCH that can go wrong with all the electronics over a period of time. Any unintended ground or short due to moisture, dirt - whatever - and the car can accelerate, decelerate, slam to a stop, or turn left into oncoming traffic and there's nothing you can do to override it.

Number 2, you're referring to the "Mansfield Bar" on the back of the trucks and trailers.

It isn't just Tesla that has the auto-pilot feature, several other companies have that feature as well. Tesla is being targeted because Elon Musk had the nerve to challenge the Liberal social media kingdom, and now it looks like they are going to be in big trouble soon if they follow through with that lawsuit.

The air bags worked well.

Re #8, so named because Jayne Mansfield was killed when the car she was riding in drove under the rear of a tractor trailer rig, with predictably gruesome results.

My sister sent me a text message on wednesday saying she had just seen the worst accident… this was it. My immediate reaction was to suspect the auto pilot, but the article says the 2015 Tesla only has limited auto pilot, including lane change assist. Sounds like they got a lane change they didn’t ask for

Re #12, I know that area well, used to live near there. As to unwanted automatic lane change, perhaps so. An airline pilot relative got conversion training for one of the first Airbus airliners, the A300. I asked about what was learned about the new "fly by wire" airliner. The pilot replied that after six weeks of training, the most memorable thing was related to the autopilot systems. (5% of airline flight time is flown by the autopilot, with the pilots just monitoring. The relative said, "If you are watching the instruments and suddenly something is weird and you get a 'What the heck is THAT?' moment, hit the red button, NOW. The airplane may be in the process of killing you." The red button is the autopilot disconnect button on the control yoke. Autopilots in aircraft usually have MILES of clear air around them. In a car, it can be a couple or four feet to hitting something like the rear of that semi-trailer. Autopilot error in a car has very little margin. Beware of all automated steering systems, they are just machines and they can easily kill you, and they have no "self-protection' instinct.

#13 Airplane autopilot, as I understand, makes no decisions - it just holds a direction (and elevation?). Almost a no brainer. Tesla auto pilot is trying to look at the surroundings and be at least as smart as a human in interpreting and reacting. How many will have to die in this experiment before we realize it’s virtually impossible?