I think it’s mostly caused by the folks making abrupt lane changes as the Tesla slows down. You can see people start to swerve into other lanes instead of just slowing down (they are looking in their side mirrors to avoid the slow car and sometimes even accelerate). I’ve had this happen where you are cruising at a speed and the person in front of you serves to avoid a slow car and now you lose all of the time to react by changing lanes as well
I’d even wager if that pickup hadn’t swerved and everyone just slowed down it wouldn’t have piled up
Side tangent, I love watching car crash videos. Really interesting to see how the system breaks down and people make mistakes. I spend hours on YouTube sometimes :)
They kind of creep me out when it is a crash that was not avoidable. But, boy, most of the crashes have me talking to the computer display, "What are you thinking? You have no stopping distance at all, I know exactly what's coming up in about 3 seconds!"
The car behind the pickup truck had almost 0 stopping distance. To me, it looks like the pile up could have been prevented there too. Good reminder to keep a safe distance.
> I’ve had this happen where you are cruising at a speed and the person in front of you serves to avoid a slow car and now you lose all of the time to react by changing lanes as well
It's worth anticipating this by watching the other lanes and what drivers are doing. If you can see a slow down happening in an adjacent lane then you might reasonably expect at least one of the drivers approaching to pull over in front of you.
I’d even wager if that pickup hadn’t swerved and everyone just slowed down it wouldn’t have piled up
Side tangent, I love watching car crash videos. Really interesting to see how the system breaks down and people make mistakes. I spend hours on YouTube sometimes :)