
Driver dies after Tesla Model X catches fire in California - merraksh
http://www.theweek.co.uk/electric-cars/92530/driver-dies-after-tesla-model-x-catches-fire-in-california
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tbirrell
This is a misleading title. The driver died due to injuries sustained by
crashing into a barrier then getting run into multiple times, not because of
the fire.

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briandear
Sure, but it promotes the "Silicon Valley car tech is killing people"
narrative. How many times would you ever see the headline, "Old woman crushed
by a Buick?" Probably never. But if it were a Tesla -- then the headline would
be "Elon Musk kills old woman with a Tesla" \-- or something equally
ridiculous.

With the Uber self driving car story in Arizona, a human driver wouldn't have
been able to avoid hitting that person -- the victim essentially committed
suicide by traffic, but the "angle" of the story has continued to be some
variation of "self driving cars are killers."

It's the media generating click-bait by playing to ignorance or Luddite fears.

For many years, you'd see headlines like "SUV crashes into a house and kills a
small child." As if the fact that the vehicle was an SUV was material, when
the actual cause was a driver who fell asleep at the wheel. But that sort of
title played into the big SUV backlash that happened in the early 2000s. I
never saw, "Convertible kills small child," or "Hatchback plows through a
wedding, killing the groom." It was always, "SUV this" and now it's "Tesla
that" or "Self-driving car this.."

Now, we see the same thing: anything "self driving," anything "Tesla" or
"Uber" or anything related to those "evil" Silicon Valley people gets top
billing and clicked. A local taxi driver assaulting a drunk girl wouldn't make
the local news. An Uber driver being slightly rude to a pet cat would make
international headlines.

"Man dies in auto accident doesn't get the emotions working like "Man murdered
by an Uber driven by killer robot."

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grzm
Yesterday’s discussion (over 90 comments):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16694365](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16694365)

