US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

> The collision happened because the sun was in the Tesla driver's eyes, so the Tesla driver was not charged, said Raul Garcia, public information officer for the department.

Am I missing something or is this the gross miscarriage of justice that it sounds like? The driver could afford a $40k vehicle but not $20 polarized shades from Amazon? Negligence is negligence.

I'm genuinely not sure what the answer is.

When you're driving directly in the direction of a setting sun, polarized sunglasses won't help you at all. That's what sun visors are for, but they won't always work if you're short, and can block too much of the environment if you're too tall.

The only truly safe answer is really to pull to the side of the road and wait for the sun to set. But in my life I've never seen anybody do that ever, and it would absolutely wreck traffic with little jams all over the city that would cascade.

No, polarized sunglasses work fine. I drive into a setting sun probably once a week to no incident.

That doesn't make any sense to me.

First of all, polarization is irrelevant when looking at the sun. It only affects light that is reflected off things like other cars' windows, or water on the street. In fact, it's often recommended not to use polarized sunglasses while driving because you can miss wet or icy patches on the road.

Secondly, standard sunglasses don't let you look directly at the sun, even a setting one. The sun is still dangerously bright.

I’m not looking directly at the sun I am looking at the road. Either way it makes a big difference and you don’t get much black ice here in sunny southern california.

But the scenario we're talking about is when the sun is just a few degrees away from the road. It's still entering your eyeball directly. It's still literally blinding, so I just... don't understand how you can do that? Like, I certainly can't. Sunglasses -- polarized or otherwise -- don't make the slightest difference. It's why sun visors exist.

Also, I'm assuming you get rain in SoCal at least sometimes, that then mostly dries up but not completely? Or leaking fire hydrants and so forth? It's the unexpected wet patches.

When we get rain in socal its a deluge. The first couple months of 2024 we had more rain than seattle. That being said there is a big difference wearing sunglasses and not. Actually I was in a parking garage today and thought of this very thread, because the sun was shining on the cement ground through the side and was literally blinding. To my naked eye it was like a blown out photograph, just pure light on the ground. I put the sunglasses on that were around my neck and what do you know. Not only did the glare go down it went down to the point I could now make out the little half rainbow streaks the cement pavers added to the floor. Same thing happens on our cement highways or when you get bad glare off of someones relatively freshly waxed car. I had a period of two weeks where I lost my polarized glasses and it was like I was disabled going outside in the day; I had to squint to even stand it because of how many white painted or cement surfaces we have here in socal. I grew up in the midwest where I did not really own sunglasses at all fwiw. Here it is mandatory for the amount of unclouded sunlight coupled with the usually white or light grey surface treatment on a lot of things.