Comment by jdlshore | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdlshore | Hacker News Reader

This thread seems a bit bizarre to me. At the risk of sounding like a Tesla apologist—I’m not, but I know there’s a fair few out there—the author has two main complaints:

1) In an emergency situation, Tesla didn’t send an emergency tow truck, but instead directed him to call 911.

Well, yeah! It’s an emergency, call 911! That’s what it’s there for. They would have dispatched his call to the appropriate highway service and gotten his car out of the road. Why the fuck didn’t he call 911 immediately, as soon as he was safe, instead of hoofing it down the road to a random work crew?

(The cherry on the top: he expresses surprise that said random work crew doesn’t have number of CHP. You know who does? The 911 dispatcher!)

2) His car died in the middle of the road for unknown reasons.

And… that’s it. Unknown car failure. Sure, it’s bad, but also not particularly unusual. Car failures happen. They’re often dangerous. Repair work is in progress and nothing else is known.

And that’s it. Most of the thread is complaining about self-inflicted inability to get emergency service in emergency situation.

> Tesla didn’t send an emergency tow truck, but instead directed him to call 911

So about 3 years ago, there was a car which got a wheel stuck in the caltrain crossing near 4th st in SF (they turned right into the tracks without completely crossing over).

We were appalled to find out that the guy in the car was on hold with the rental company & we immediately called 911.

The cops responded within 2 minutes (they were probably parked in UCSF) and stopped the trains on 22nd.

People do panic and don't always think straight on what should be done in an emergency.

So about 3 years ago, there was a car which got a wheel stuck in the CALTRAIN crossing near 4th st in SF (they turned right into the tracks without completely crossing over). We were appalled to find out that the guy in the car was on hold with the rental company & we immediately called 911.

Of course you call 911. You also call the number on the blue and white "REPORT EMERGENCY OR PROBLEM" sign that's at every US crossing and read them the crossing number on that sign. Usually it connects to the train dispatcher who controls that track, has the controls to turn signals red, and has a radio link to the locomotives. Call that number, tell them there's a car stuck on the tracks at crossing 123 456, and trains will be stopped.

DOT actually says to call that number before calling 911. The 911 dispatcher will eventually call the railroad, but there may be confusion and delay as to where the problem is. (Cops use street names and addresses, railroads use routes and milepost numbers.)

Those blue and white signs are kind of low key. Maybe too low key. It's not obvious that the blue and white sign gets you to the person who actually controls the trains.

If stuck on a crossing, get out of the vehicle, get well clear of the crossing, like 50-100 feet, and call. Then, once the train dispatcher tells you they have rail traffic stopped, efforts to extract the vehicle can begin.

The biggest one, which you missed, is the fact that the car could not be put in neutral making it impossible to push outside the lane. If my car dies on a 6 lane HW I make sure to get it to the safe lane first; I'm not staying there like dead meat waiting for some truck to hit me at 130km/h

Every car, no matter of it's running state, unless it is damaged at the mechanical components, should be able to place in neutral and pushed in situations like this.

This is my beef with these electric cars and non electric cars (but with electric parking system/shift)

After a malfunction like this, a car without a mechanical e-brake can be left in two states, both dangerous -- free rolling or locked in place.

You can always secure a manual car or a car with a parking pawl by shifting into gear or P, so I assume it's more okay to leave them in the free-rolling state if they die completely.

But you can't do the same in a Tesla which doesn't have a parking pawl, so I assume someone made the decision that a forever-locked-up Tesla is safer than a forever-free-rolling Tesla.

I also agree that should be an even-more-emergency mechanism (like a valve on the brake circuit) you could operate manually to disable the emergency lock-up, but in the case of a Tesla fiddling with that hypothetical valve would also disable your brakes completely sooo. Dunno. The car just doesn't have enough hardware.

Isn't mechanical brakes still a requirement for any car? So it's rolling when brake is not pressed, and stops when brake is pressed?

I'm not sure what you mean by "mechanical brakes". The brakes on a Tesla are normal hydraulic car brakes that do exactly that. They work even without power (more force required, of course). But just like in many modern cars, there is no separate manual parking brake.

So put a lever on the brake.

There's no way I'd try to push a car stuck in a highway lane. I would abandon my car and get to off the highway ASAP. That's a super dangerous situation.

It also reads like someone in a state of panic. You don’t think clearly. I’ve had worse experiences in older cars. Wind screen wiper getting taken off by a branch in a storm, bonnet flying straight up and slamming into my windscreen, brakes completely failing while going down a hill heading towards an intersection, etc. Panic solves nothing, just makes you stop thinking clearly. At least this guy’s car told him there’s a problem. My dumb mechanical cars had no idea.

It might be a better idea to have the car do an auto 911 call and report it's distress. I wonder if the 911 style system could be setup to receive such input as a simple text from advanced vehicles?

In Europe a system called "ecall" ("emergency" call) is mandatory in all cars sold after april 2018:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECall

On my 2019 Tesla Model 3 it's a button near the rear mirror.

I've heard that in some cases (crash) the cars makes the call automatically (happened to a friend, after a crash he heard someone talk to him through the system to check if he was ok).

> brakes completely failing while going down a hill heading towards an intersection

I'm curious about how you got out of that one :) Handbrake?

Shift into low gear, unless you are unlucky enough to find yourself in an automatic transmission car.

Every single automatic transmission car I've been to (couple of dozen, US) had the low gear.

Can you shift into it when moving and will it perform engine braking? Not sure the AT would survive that.

From the owner's manual for the 2001 Ford Explorer, page 167: https://www.fordservicecontent.com/Ford_Content/Catalog/owne...

>Use 2 (Second) to start-up on slippery roads or to provide additional engine braking on downgrades.

>Use 1 (First) to provide maximum engine braking on steep downgrades.

The weak point is the engine, not the transmission. If you're at 7,000 in fourth gear, and you command a shift to 1st gear, it will grenade your crankshaft. Some transmission control modules are smart enough to refuse to do this.

I am surprised annautomatic transmission can handle that. But I guess we are a long way from the old synchromesh days.

Live and learn!

Synchromesh is a manual transmission technology and is perfectly robust to downshifting. Every auto gearbox in history has been capable of downshifting and can handle it just fine. I downshift my 50 year old C4 transmission regularly.

Manual transmission (think Americans call it driving “stick”). You gear down then you can use hand break when you’re slow enough. Actually, I was taught to break by gearing down instead of just applying the breaks. I still went through that intersection though, the lights were red. I had my hazards on and prayed no one ran into me.

If you're piloting a ship or aircraft, there are multiple levels of distress call available to you; not everything needs to be called in as a mayday. But for drivers on the road, 911 has to serve as a one size fits all resource, which leads to doubt in situations like these where it is not yet necessary to send an ambulance or firefighters.

The most severe emergencies are the ones people most readily associate with calling 911, and it takes education and outreach to reassure people that it's okay to call 911 for less severe situations—before things go from bad to worse.

911 isn't going to send you ambulance/firefighters/helicopters unless needed to. I believe most of the calls they receive "there's a big trash on the road".

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