158 Vehicle Accident

[Briar Lee]

7 dead, 25 injured in 'super fog' multi-car pileup on Louisiana highway: Police​

A super fog occurs when smoke and water vapor combine, according to the NWS.

A "super fog" in Louisiana has caused a multi-car pileup on Interstate 55 near New Orleans, Louisiana, after severely lowering visibility, according to police.

The crash, involving at least 158 vehicles, occurred on Monday morning due to heavy fog conditions, according to Louisiana State Police. A long stretch of Interstate 55, a 24-mile-long highway over Lake Pontchartrain near New Orleans, is expected to be closed "for the foreseeable future," police said.

Interstate 10 and Interstate 310 were also closed as a result of the crash, police said. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards confirmed the accident in a statement Monday. Seven fatalities have been confirmed and over 25 individuals were transported to area hospitals with varying degrees of injuries from critical to minor, according to Louisiana State Police.

Additional fatalities could be located once the crash scene is completed cleared, police said.

For hours after the crash, emergency crews worked to clear debris from both northbound and southbound lanes, according to state police. A portion of the crash scene on I-55 caught on fire shortly after the initial incident, authorities said.

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Tesla cars and many other brands, have semi autonomous driving systems. You can’t go to sleep and are supposed to keep your hands on the wheel, but they are marketed and sold.

https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/advice/cars-that-are-almost-self-driving

The potential to nearly eliminate vehicle accidents is promising, but we aren’t there yet.

Until then I think the miracle is we have so few accidents with people running 75 miles an hour and death or devastation only a couple or three seconds away at any given time.

 

[Hillcrest]

This giant bumper car is street-legal and enormously delightful

The creation of a Pennsylvania man named Dan Hryhorcoff, the enormous bumper car is 13 feet long and street-legal. Here's how it works.

www.popsci.com

 

[El Capitán]

Such a tragedy. Hopefully there will be no more fatalities.

 

[sablebrush52]

We get pile ups on the 5 going through the Central Valley when the tule fog moves in. I've driven the 5 at night under these conditions and it's weird to be driving with about 20 to 30 feet of visibility, just a little strip of road fading into gray mist. You can't make out vehicle lights until you're almost upon them. People don't slow down nearly enough to provide an extra margin of safety to begin with and when a collision occurs it rapidly builds as one clueless driver after another slams into it.
At this point the Tesla autopilot is, to put it mildly, unreliable. Eventually Tesla, or someone else, will get it right.

 

[Briar Lee]

Don’t tell me there ain’t no Jesus.

Once upon a time I was going through Kansas City during the evening rush hour.

There was a shushy snow on the interstate but it was wet and not icy.

A Missouri State Highway Patrol hit his red lights and pulled me over, out of the middle of countless cars and trucks, and said I was not speeding but I was driving too fast for conditions. No ticket, but he warned me to slow down. He said the roads could freeze and I’d regret not running slower.

I thanked him for his concern and said I was much obliged and he smiled and said any man who smokes a pipe should die of old age, not in a wreck trying to get home. He got in his cruiser and drove away.

I pulled back out determined to drive slower than the herd.

A couple of miles up the freeway I saw a car that had passed me spin out on black ice and hit another, and those hit other cars, and I braked and slid and turned and twisted through an enormous pile up, sliding on black ice, missing cars by inches, sure I’d wreck, but safely came out the other side, and behind me was a scene of utter chaos.

I’ve always wondered where the Highway Patrolman who stopped me, went. I was following his tail lights, and don’t remember avoiding him, but a big wreck on the highway is always a confusing mess.

The problem every self driving system will always have is the unexpected deer or cow or black ice or boulder or any other number of sudden and unexpected conditions that cannot be programmed in.