False. There exists a following distance and amount of paying attention that would have involved 0 cars hitting the tesla. If you look really closely at it at least 3 cars (maybe 4) stopped with next to no incident (it's not discernible if they even touched). It's the 5th or 6th car that shoves everyone into everyone else (and quite dramatically gets under the car infront of them and pops them up)
> that while conscious and not in any kind of distress?
I'd be less understanding, yes.
But at this point it's presumable that the autopilot was in "distress" (avoiding a perceived issue). And when such a thing comes up, real or false, the drivers behind need to be ready to react. And several of the cars did so quite well actually. The only reason this is a dramatic incident is because of the like 5th or 6th car that hits everyone else hard.
+1 to this, I ride motorcycle and lane split (in California) and frequently see people doing 80miles an hour looking down at the phone in their lap. This means even their peripheral vision is out of play, at least if they held the phone at 12 oclock over the steering wheel there'd be some non focused vision... smh
Honestly I think Carplay would save more lives if they allowed reading messages via infotainment screen instead of me having to tap my phone (voice messaging doesn't exist in most languages and Apple wouldn't Google to step in, lol)
