Toronto, Ontario — In this weekly electric and autonomous vehicle report, Tesla gets permits for an extravagant charging station; an Uber driver catches a felony for a fatal self-driving car collision and Orlando debuts a self-driving shuttle—only for it to crash two days later.
Dinner, a show and a recharge
Tesla has been granted permits to build a diner and drive-in Supercharger station in California.
The location will be in Los Angeles and incorporate 32 stalls of Superchargers as well as an attached restaurant with a rooftop seating area. There will be two screens showing clips of famous movies, according to Teslarati’s initial report.
Tesla first submitted applications for the project last November, but only received approvals last month.
Taking the blame
The Uber driver operating a self-driving vehicle that killed a pedestrian in Arizona in 2018 has been sentenced to three years of supervised probation after he pleaded guilty in what was reportedly the first-ever fatal collision involving a fully autonomous car.
Rafaela Vasquez has been charged with negligent homicide. Authorities said Vasquez was streaming a TV show when the collision occurred, looking down at her phone moments before the Volvo XC-90 SUV struck the victim, who was crossing the street on her bicycle. Vasquez told authorities that the victim came out of nowhere.
Defence attorney Albert Jaynes Morrison told the Judge that Uber, too, should take some blame for the collision.
“There were steps that Uber failed to take. It was not a question of it, but when it was going to happen.”
Prosecutors had previously declined to file any criminal charges against Uber as a corporation and concluded that Vasquez’s failure to monitor the road was the determining cause of the crash.
Oops in Orlando
A brand-new driverless shuttle service launched in Orlando, Fla., crashed last week just two days after launching.
No one was injured in the crash, though one passenger shared a video of their experience to TikTok.
@samorlando220 Tried out the new SWAN Shuttle auntonmous shuttle in Downtown Orlando today. We crashed. #Beep ♬ original sound – Sam Gallaher
Both the shuttle and the bus it scraped again suffered minor cosmetic damage.
