When they're pronounced dead at the scene, you know it's bad. That only happens with what the NTSB calls "injuries incompatible with life", which is right up there with "controlled flight into terrain" as one of the NTSBs top morbid euphemisms.
In our EMS system, there are a few situations in which BLS providers (EMTs, without access to an ECG) are allowed to declare someone dead in the field (note, coroner, police, etc., may still be involved, and they're not signing the death notice)...
"Body position incompatible with life" is one.
(For the morbidly curious, the others are: rigor mortis, livor mortis (lividity), decapitation, incineration, decomposition, evisceration of brain and/or heart.)
And in the setting of traumatic arrest (generally not considered survivable because it often implies massive internal blood loss), also: "obvious, devastating blunt or penetrating trauma to the head and is pulseless and apneic after opening airway", and "severe blunt or penetrating trauma and remains pulseless and apneic after the performance of all appropriate prehospital life-saving interventions for potentially reversible causes, including but not limited to, definitive airway management, external hemorrhage control, definitive chest decompression, and pericardiocentesis."
which, of course, is bullshit. "self-driving" excludes the intervention of a person. The state of a person during "self-driving" should be meaningless.
“It’s also important to be precise about what this is and isn’t. This was not an autonomous driving crash. Tesla does not offer Full Self-Driving on the Semi — it’s still test-fleet hardware, spotted validating sensors in California just days earlier — so the driver was likely in full manual control. A driver falling asleep is a human-fatigue failure, not a software one, and anyone folding this into the FSD debate is confusing the story.”
> That leaves the question of automatic emergency braking: why didn’t the truck slow or stop itself before hitting stationary vehicles at a lit intersection? AEB is designed for exactly this scenario — it detects vehicles or obstacles in the truck’s path and applies the brakes when a collision is imminent, regardless of driver input.
Most modern Class 8 trucks are already equipped with collision-mitigation systems from suppliers like Bendix and Detroit Assurance
So Tesla made a decision to make their semi less safe than the average for the vehicle class.
They could have had basic safety equipment, but they wanted to save a buck. Now two people are dead and another is almost dead. This is gross negligence on the Tesla semi truck’s engineering team and the executive leadership.
When they're pronounced dead at the scene, you know it's bad. That only happens with what the NTSB calls "injuries incompatible with life", which is right up there with "controlled flight into terrain" as one of the NTSBs top morbid euphemisms.
In our EMS system, there are a few situations in which BLS providers (EMTs, without access to an ECG) are allowed to declare someone dead in the field (note, coroner, police, etc., may still be involved, and they're not signing the death notice)...
"Body position incompatible with life" is one.
(For the morbidly curious, the others are: rigor mortis, livor mortis (lividity), decapitation, incineration, decomposition, evisceration of brain and/or heart.)
And in the setting of traumatic arrest (generally not considered survivable because it often implies massive internal blood loss), also: "obvious, devastating blunt or penetrating trauma to the head and is pulseless and apneic after opening airway", and "severe blunt or penetrating trauma and remains pulseless and apneic after the performance of all appropriate prehospital life-saving interventions for potentially reversible causes, including but not limited to, definitive airway management, external hemorrhage control, definitive chest decompression, and pericardiocentesis."
The Electrek article referenced is a better link: https://electrek.co/2026/07/01/tesla-semi-first-fatal-crash-...
Either way, the interesting bit is:
which, of course, is bullshit. "self-driving" excludes the intervention of a person. The state of a person during "self-driving" should be meaningless.
If it is meaningful, then it's not "self-driving"
“It’s also important to be precise about what this is and isn’t. This was not an autonomous driving crash. Tesla does not offer Full Self-Driving on the Semi — it’s still test-fleet hardware, spotted validating sensors in California just days earlier — so the driver was likely in full manual control. A driver falling asleep is a human-fatigue failure, not a software one, and anyone folding this into the FSD debate is confusing the story.”
This story is so unbelievably sad!
> That leaves the question of automatic emergency braking: why didn’t the truck slow or stop itself before hitting stationary vehicles at a lit intersection? AEB is designed for exactly this scenario — it detects vehicles or obstacles in the truck’s path and applies the brakes when a collision is imminent, regardless of driver input. Most modern Class 8 trucks are already equipped with collision-mitigation systems from suppliers like Bendix and Detroit Assurance
So Tesla made a decision to make their semi less safe than the average for the vehicle class.
They could have had basic safety equipment, but they wanted to save a buck. Now two people are dead and another is almost dead. This is gross negligence on the Tesla semi truck’s engineering team and the executive leadership.
It has the feature; but it failed to function. The design wasn't cheap, it was incompetent.
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