"Who's the U-Boat commander?"
Fans of the film "Risky Business," Tom Cruise's 1983 breakout movie, may remember the words of the Porsche service manager to our hapless hero after his father's prized Porsche is pulled out of Lake Michigan.
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Now, some 40 years later, we have the story of driver in Mono City, Calif., known only as Ryan, who did a variation of this rather soggy theme.
Only instead of a Porsche, Ryan was behind the wheel of a Tesla (TSLA) -) Model 3.
In a video posted on the YouTube channel Wham Baam Teslacam, the post offers a series of Tesla owners' real experiences as told by dashcam and sentry mode videos.
Ryan told the channel that he was driving at about 60 mph while using Tesla's Full Self-Driving option, which requires the motorist to be ready to take over should something go wrong.
Hitting the water
And in Ryan's case, things went wrong indeed.
Ryan told the channel that the car did not decelerate appropriately when crossing a stream of water, and it promptly slid to the side of the road and then into a large body of standing water.
The dashcam footage is rather dramatic at the moment of impact, as water flies in all directions and, while the pond wasn't anywhere near as deep as Lake Michigan, the video does show half the car submerged in the drink.
We're not sure how Ryan reacted to this, but it's doubtful that he was dancing around in his underwear to Bob Seger's "Old Time Rock-n-Roll."
Although Ryan said there was a "Flooded" sign visible on the roadside, he maintained that similar signs are in the area with usually with no water present.
Ryan told the channel that he's pretty sure his vehicle is totaled, adding that he's planning to sue the city and Tesla.
He appealed to the channel's viewers for their help, but the driver-turned-diver wasn't getting much love from the YouTube comment crowd.
"Frankly, assuming that Autopilot would handle an edge case like this is extremely irresponsible," one person commented. "A responsible and/or attentive driver would have taken manual control as soon as the water was visible."
"Ryan, you are up a creek without a paddle," another person said. "You saw the flooded sign and chose to ignore it. Your car ending up in water is no one else's fault but your own. FSD is still in beta and you are required to pay attention and take over when needed."
Ready to react
"Sorry, Ryan," another YouTube comment read. "That one is 100% on you. Even in FSD you must still keep your eyes on the road and ready to react to driving conditions. This time a sign was there to help you out, and you still ignored it."
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been talking about Tesla's Full Self-Driving technology for lo these many years.
"I know I’m the boy who cried FSD,” he said on Tesla's second-quarter earnings call. “But man, I think we’ll be better than human by the end of this year.”
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been conducting a probe into the safety of the technology for several years and the California attorney general recently began investigating the same feature.
A Washington Post investigation in June found Tesla Autopilot was involved in 736 crashes in the US since 2019. The report revealed that 17 were fatal and 11 deaths have occurred since May 2022.
In addition, dash cam footage of a 2021 Texas crash that left five police officers injured was used in an Aug. 9 Wall Street Journal video report that indicated the Tesla's autopilot system failed to recognize stopped emergency vehicles in time.
Of course, FSD would be a self-driving car that does not require any driver attention at all.
Musk said on Aug. 1 that his company is closer than ever to cracking it. They have only one piece of the puzzle left to solve: "vehicle control." And the biggest hurdle, he said, is not in creating the technology but in training the AI.
Well, when that happens, be sure to tell Ryan.
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