It is reported there that the quiet operation of the Tesla may have contributed to the accident.

Who sells a Jetsonmobile or warp-drive noisemaker?

Guess the owner is made of all money and no brain.

ouch

Its the Tesla owner's fault here. He was trying to worm out of bumper to bumper traffic. He was stupid "twice". First for backing into the Camry, and then rammed the Merc.

I like this part, "According to Volkov, eyewitnesses to the crash told him the Roadster had gone “unnoticed” because of its low profile and silent powertrain."

It's good to see that a lot of small, sharp carbon filber pieces were not created.

Yeah... the guy comes upon the crash several minutes after it happened... and makes this determination from what evidence? That it has a low profile and is quiet? Obviously that's what's at fault here.

What is the most common failure mode for carbon fiber anyway..?

I've broken my Callaway Big Bertha driver once and basically the shaft of that golf club became a mass of separate threads when it failed (Gotta hand it to Callaway though-- They fixed it for me good as new, free of charge ).

Can a carbon fiber structure shatter into shards when they fail?

Oh the humanity!

I love the implication that he was rear ended and pushed into the next car because his car was too quiet

Rob

Solid proof that not only blind pedestrians are at risk from quiet running cars.

I've seen too many F1 cars shatter into tiny pieces was my concern. I've been told that carbon fiber is very strong in the direction that it's "laid up". Perhaps they can make the carbon fiber pieces that are strong in more than one direction by laying the pieces up in different directions - it's a passenger car, not a state of the art racing machine so a little extra weight isn't the end of the world.

Hi Tony,

One commentor made a good point. The Tesla is black, and so was the MB in front of it.

Had a similar thing nearly happen to me, behind a pickup truck. Guy went around me at a high rate of speed, figuring there was nothing in front of me, He was too fast for the traffic in the lane he pulled into, and there was no place to go in the lane I was in, as there as a big Pickup truck, with cargo, all similar colors to my Prius. Additionally, this was into the sun, and the guy was wearing those Auto-Diming "Tom Clancy" glasses. So, he was probably near blind to the road, cetainly he was half color blind by the glasses. Luckily somebody in the lane he was in pulled left just in time.

It looks like maybe the Camry Driver tried to pull right, and the Tesla driver left to avoid the acident. But there was not enough room.

Don't diss the Tesla driver until you are tempted by a car that can go 0-60 in 3.5 sec! He was just out "trying out" his new car. I sold my 3rd gen RX-7 just because my reaction time got too long to safely drive it! And it was slower than the Tesla!!

The good thing is it's just a "fender bender".

Carbon fibre shatters into tiny shards. It's because it's stronger than steel, but brittle like glass. The shards are sharp too. In this case the hit was not violent so the structure probably cracked but didn't fail, so you don't get a lot of shards. In F1 racing the impacts are usually at 200+ km/hr so you get total destruction and lots of nice sharp little shards. Good for those nice wide thin tires!

Without placing blame (because consensus seems to be that we really don't know what happened), I'm just going to say ... This is a very unfortunate incident. (frown) It must be such a disappointment to a Tesla engineer to have just built and delivered this car and then see this happen.

What a shame for the Tesla owner. But he shoulda gotta Prius, much better payback p) and 0-60mph sometime in the morning, by which time he would have missed this accident by a few minutes....