Wonder how the autopilot does on the Kobayashi Maru test?
It's more interesting when it gets to real-life scenarios. Generally, humans in such scenarios tend toward the "take no action" variant, whether because they just freeze up or can't make up their mind fast enough. The autonomous vehicle can attempt to kill the lowest number of people as possible, and thus will be more successful than most humans.
Where do the superchargers get power if the grid is down? Do they have special dedicated lines to the ironmen, or onsite generators that burn <gasp> fossil fuels </gasp>?
It depends... Some Superchargers already have solar and batteries. Tesla has voiced a desire to move to largely local generation and storage for powering the Superchargers, but haven't made a lot of progress yet, since they're making batteries as fast as they can and they still don't have any excess supply to do that.
"Tesla is installing Powerpacks at Superchargers affected by power outages":
https://electrek.co/2019/10/10/tesl-powerpack-superchargers-power-outages/
That... But man, how many Powerpacks are they putting in? A Powerpack is 210kWh - That's really only enough for about 2.5-4 full car charges.
If you lose power on a regional basis, you also lose your mobility unless you can generate your own juice.
The worst-case scenario would be having to evacuate an area that's already without power, and having only electric cars. Then what?
In both cases, you may be better off with an electric car. It's going to be charged to 80-90% almost all the time, unless you just got home. The average car is driven less than 40 miles per day and sits for 21 hours. Using a normal 240V charging station like I have in my garage, a Tesla will recharge at 30-40 mph. So, it'd be sitting at 80 or 90 percent (or even 100), depending on what the cutoff you set is, for about 20 hours of a given day. Depending on the model in question, that could be from 175-375 miles of range. In our gasser, 175 is half a tank, so half the time the EV would have better range than the gasser.
I do probably have somewhere between 5 and 15 gallons of gas in the garage that I could use in a pinch, if I had time to siphon some of it out of the tractor, and that would help. I don't think average people tend to keep gas around, though, and certainly not the siphon hose that I do!*
Also, for those fleeing a disaster, well, they end up in horrific traffic most of the time. The gasser is going to burn a lot of fuel idling and going slow, whereas the EV will use very little energy.
Overall, I think this is likely just more fear of the unknown. I don't live in a large-scale-disaster-prone area, but I'd still buy a Tesla if I did. It'll be interesting to see what Californians say over the next few days. I'll have to ping my brother, who lives in San Jose and drives a Bolt.
* I fuel the tractor using a siphon hose because the stupid f*ç&ing California-mandated gas cans that everyone sells bend the plastic filler neck on my tractor's gas tank when used as intended.
