this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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he was sober and apparently unconscious? afaik he hasn't been interviewed yet while he gets medical treatment.
I mean if he did it on purpose, sure, but dude you have zero idea - it is entirely possible this is a medical event he had no control over, and he now has to live with being the driver in this awful situation.
can't you just care about the people affected without immediately wanting some completely uninformed revenge?
Judging by their answer, no.
I can’t find anything in the article about his state of consciousness.
Only;
Detectives had not been able to interview the 66-year-old driver from Mount Macedon as he was being treated in hospital for shock and minor injuries
And
He said the driver had been breath-tested and had no alcohol in his system.
We don’t know whether he was disabled due to a medical incident, whether he maliciously targeted the family, whether he was distracted driving, whether the vehicle malfunction or exactly why he crashed.
The thing is, if the X5 was in a roadworthy condition, the driver assistance systems should have been able to either prevent the accident outright or at least mitigate the damage caused by a runaway vehicle.
here it is: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/nov/08/daylesford-pub-crash-driver-what-happened-driver-diabetes-insulin
That is a reason, but not an excuse.
My dad was diabetic and didn’t look after himself. When he started having regular hypoglycaemic episodes, we would discourage him from driving anywhere and made him upgrade to a smaller vehicle with better safety systems.
He was an entitled baby boomer who didn’t respond well to his Silent Generation Wife and Gen X and Gen Y kids telling him what to do, but he was able to do much less damage to himself and others in a TS Astra than in a big HiLux CrewCab, especially if we hid the keys on him.
as replied elsewhere, yeah I agree that's insanely irresponsible, but we didn't know that until now.
Irresponsible? Yes. Avoidable? Maybe not.
Dad never wanted to have a hypo. It was just because he was out there doing something and got distracted from monitoring his bloody sugar. It sneaks up on you so you don’t notice until it hits you all at once.
This is why (in his later years) my mum was forced to be a part-time, on-call carer. Dad would have it under control, until he didn’t.
Having a blood sugar reaction is analogous to the guy that goes to the pub to drink one beer and drive home an hour later, but his mate buys him a beer, his other mate buys him a beer and the next thing he knows, he should be getting a taxi. The problem is that the diabetic can’t keep track of how many empty beer glasses there are.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/dec/11/man-charged-over-daylesford-hotel-beer-garden-crash-that-left-five-people-dead
just saw this as a follow up, thought you might be curious. i feel bad for everyone honestly. dude has to be an idiot but god, what a consequence to live with.
Driving an X5 is a choice though, and having an unnecessarily large vehicle multiplies the damage when something does go wrong.
you want to jail everyone who drives an SUV for life?
i mean i fucking hate SUVs and melbourne is absolutely filthy with them - i absolutely think they should have a tax penalty to discourage anyone living there from owning them needlessly, but still - if this is some older farmer who had an unexpected minor stroke and has to wake up to the news he's killed five people, i'm not going to be standing in the fucking hospital berating him about his choice of car and trying to make him feel like a murderer. that's absolutely fucking awful.
have some opinions on sensible car regulation, sure, but this is gross. wait until you know what happened before calling for blood for owning a type of car or some shit.
They should not be driving a large vehicle if they have a medical history precluding them from operating heavy machinery.
The dude was diabetic and had a history of having hypos.
Epileptics don’t drive at night if they can avoid it, because of the flashing lights:
Why was this guy driving (especially such a large vehicle) when his blood sugar was not properly regulated?
agree completely. that's fucked. I accept it may not have been malicious but it's crazy irresponsible.
but that detail came out a day after the guy baying for his blood above, my point was if you have no idea what actually happened, focus on having compassion for people affected, not immediately getting a pitchfork and yelling for "justice".
that kind of justice... well, it usually isn't justice.
I think if you choose to do something that puts people at a higher risk than necessary, you should be responsible for the consequences.
If you drink drive and kill someone, you can't say it was an accident. If you're doing burnouts in a crowded street and kill someone, you can't say you didn't mean it. Same with speeding. Driving a death machine puts us all at a heightened risk, and when things go wrong, there should be consequences.
The people who died in Daylesford definitely had consequences of this drivers choice. Why shouldn't the driver have consequences?
Generally you don't prosecute someone who had a medical issue while driving regardless of how large their vehicle is.
What an utterly insane take you got here.
Why don't you try giving a counter argument instead of resorting to hyperbole.
So your argument is that it's not generally done? I know that it's not generally done. I was talking about what I want to happen.