Here’s what I see in that video, and I’m trying to be as neutral as I can.
The vehicle strikes the “Jersey wall” at the lane shift. I do not know unequivocally if the car was self-driving, manually piloted, or some combination. I do know that those lanes were not legally/correctly marked for the circumstances and it was raining.
So I’m not going to make a judgment about the –cause- of the collision. I am, however, going to make some observations about what happens AFTER the collision.
Upon strike, the vehicle is physically thrown to the right, it’s emergency flashers instantly activate and the vehicle recovers, without over-correcting, and begins a
completely controlled and gradual deceleration.
This is absolutely astounding for a number of reasons.
If you pay close attention you can see the uninterrupted skid mark, off center from the rear wheel. This tells us that, at minimum, the
driver’s front wheel was locked up by the collision and was just sliding. That means this car maintained control, did not over-correct, fishtail, or strike other vehicles with one of its steering/control wheels out of commission and dragging like an anchor. I can tell you for a fact that 90% of human drivers would have done one, or a combination, of the following things…
- Spun out
- Crossed over in front of the Jeep (who probably would have then struck the Tesla).
- Over corrected back into the left barrier.
- Wobbled all over the place.
- Jammed on the brakes abruptly, and been rear-ended by the car with the dash cam.
In addition, full telemetry from the car, and “machine learning” models mean that the minute Tesla’s programmers and engineers figure out why this happened, ALL Tesla cars will know about it and such a thing will probably never happen again.
So perhaps the Tesla is responsible for the collision in the first place, I don't know, but I do know that from the moment of impact on the car handled things better than any human could have.