Car napper
Senior citizens are prone to falls. But when they are driving in multilevel car parks, the car falls with them.
That’s how the Toyota Innova of Dr. Teodoro Paraiso Llamanzares, the father-in-law of Senator Grace Poe, ended up in the parking lot in front of
Greenhills Shopping Center’s Promenade building in San Juan City in November 2018. The 83-year-old doctor was driving to the third floor of the multilevel carpark when the car fell injuring him.
Last 11 September, a 61-year-old man drove his car to the edge of the second floor of the Philippine Ports Authority parking building in Manila and fell on top of a parked SUV on the ground. The driver was injured. Fortunately, the SUV was unoccupied. The first Tesla driver to die from a crash, Apple software engineer and game developer Walter Huang, was on autopilot when he slammed into a safety barrier before two other cars hit his Tesla Model X in Silicon Valley, California in 2018.
Perhaps, old drivers should be using selfdriving cars to minimize accidents. Tesla cars can be set to autopilot, so the driver can just sit back and relax while the car proceeds to its destination. Setting it on autopilot also enables the car to steer, accelerate and brake automatically within its lane.
However, self-driving cars are not crashproof. Last month, Devainder Goli was on autopilot when he crashed into a police car on Highway 64, North Carolina.
The first Tesla driver to die from a crash, Apple software engineer and game developer Walter Huang, was on autopilot when he slammed into a safety barrier before two other cars hit his Tesla Model X in Silicon Valley, California in 2018.
But the cars were not faulty when they crashed. The drivers themselves were to blame for the accidents.
Goli was watching television while the car was on self-driving mode. Investigators found out Huang was playing a video game on his smartphone at the time of his fatal crash.
Lately, a Tesla crash was averted after police stopped it for overspeeding on a rural Canadian highway. Police Sergeant Darrin Turnbull said the electric car was running on autopilot at 140 kilometers per hour on a 110 kph highway near the town of Ponoka in Alberta province on Thursday.
The 20-year-old driver got more than a ticket for violating the speed limit. He was later charged with dangerous driving.
“Nobody was looking out the windshield to see where the car was going,” Turnbull said, according to AFP.
Both front seats of the car were completely reclined as the driver was sleeping.