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| I skimmed through the comments. There are a lot now and I’m probably not going to digest and reply to all of them.
Some are maybe interpreting what I said as I had 0 brakes.
In the mud conditions on the two times where nothing bad happened (because of much slower initial speeds) it really did feel like 0 brakes. Just felt like letting off the throttle.
On the dry gravel situation where I wrecked, I definitely had brakes. Just felt like it was slowing down about half as quickly as I would have expected on any other vehicle.
Someone asked if there were tracks. There were no tracks until the last little bit where I briefly considered trying to make the corner. I swerved and then got worried that I would roll and hit the embankment on our roof so I changed my mind and headed back towards the ditch. That swerving action left tracks. The rest of the time there were no tracks. This is as I expected because the way it was braking I could not imagine it leaving a hint of a skid mark.
Again I was just skimming the responses so maybe I misunderstood but one poster seems to think I may have hit the throttle instead of the brakes. If I had accidentally hit the throttle I can assure you my kids and I would all be goners. I did lose a lot of speed between when I hit the brakes and when I wrecked. Just not nearly as much as I expected. Can’t imagine how I would have lost speed while mashing the throttle.
Some are interpreting my comments as trying to blame the car and not myself. I guess I’m confused by that interpretation. In my original post and in several replies I made it clear that I am experiencing a great deal of regret about driving aggressively.
The fact is though, I did drive aggressively and therefore entered a realm of driving that people who never drive aggressively will never encounter until they see a black cow on the road too late at night or someone pulls out in front of you or who knows what other emergency situation. If you travel off pavement a lot and you have or are considering a Tesla (or heck, any vehicle really), maybe you should put yourself into one of those emergency stopping situations just to make sure you’re comfortable with the performance of the brakes on gravel.
I am surprised at the number of people who are very confident about what happened (even though they weren’t there) when I’m not 100% confident (even though I was there). The only thing I know is I was driving faster than I should have (although I don’t know what speed because I wasn’t watching the speedometer) and I hit the brakes later than I should have for the braking capacity of the car in those conditions (although at the time I expected more out of the brakes).
What I believe but can’t know for sure is that our other vehicles would have stopped fine if they experienced the same conditions.
I created this thread because I committed to follow-ups and I don’t like to back out of commitments I made. I could have been less transparent but it’s just not my style to save myself embarrassment by hiding details. I made bad choices. I can’t go back and change them. But I can change how I behave in the future so that’s what I’m trying to focus on although frankly it’s difficult to think about anything other than what did happen and how fortunate I am to have gotten off so easy. How thankful I am that my kids are OK. How I’m never going to elevate the risk of driving because I’m late or any other stupid reason ever again.
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Tesla update
