I was watching a video about how one of, if not the first, fatalities from self driving cars, Joshua Brown, was this huge Elon stan. He would make YouTube videos about his self driving car. The whole Elon cult is so creepy and pathetic. There’s some strange irony in his death

Another of Brown’s videos on YouTube attracted the attention of Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of Tesla, prompting Brown to tweet: “@elonmusk noticed my video…I’m in seventh heaven!” The New York Times reported that Brown told a neighbour at the time: “for something to catch Elon Musk’s eye, I can die and go to heaven now.”

Brown’s confidence in the autopilot was such that he tested it to the maximum… Ironically, the situation that his car appears to have failed to handle was relatively routine.

On a straight section of Florida highway, a truck with a trailer moved across Brown’s path but the sensors on the Tesla seem not to have detected its presence. The car, remarkably, tried to squeeze under the trailer, smashing its windscreen and going on to hit two fences, crossing a field and coming to rest against a pole 30 metres south of the road.

It was Brown’s over-confidence in the system that almost certainly killed him. A laptop and portable DVD player were found at the scene, though neither were running when the Florida Highway Patrol arrived. The truck driver Frank Baressi, who rushed up to the wrecked Tesla, claimed that a Harry Potter movie was playing on Brown’s DVD player.