Tesla’s range of electric vehicles may have advanced self-driving features, but a driver is still required to be present and alert at all times. In a fatal crash on Saturday, that definitely wasn’t the case.
As KHOU 11 reports, the crash occurred on Saturday night in the Carlton Woods Subdivision on Hammock Dunes Place, just north of the Augusta Pines Golf Club in Texas. It involved a 2019 Tesla Model S traveling at high speed, which failed to take a “slight curve” and instead left the road, hit a tree, and burst into flames.
According to Harris County Pct. 4 Constable Mark Herman, “Normally when the fire department arrives, they have the vehicle fire in control in minutes, but this went on close to four hours.” When it was eventually extinguished using over 30,000 gallons of water, police found two passengers inside the vehicle (aged 59 and 69), both of whom had died in the fire.
Unlike previous Tesla crashes where the safety of the vehicle has been called into question, in this case it looks to be a clear case of dangerous driving simply because nobody was driving the car.
“They are 100 percent certain that no one was in the driver seat driving that vehicle at the time of impact. They are positive,” Herman said. “And again, the height from the back seat to the front seat, that would be almost impossible, but again our investigators are trained. They handle collisions. Several of our folks are reconstructionists, but they feel very confident just with the positioning of the bodies after the impact that there was no one driving that vehicle.”
The investigation is ongoing to try and figure out exactly what happened. Due to the extent of the fire damage it seems unlikely Tesla will be able to salvage any data prior to the crash directly from the vehicle, but both Tesla and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will certainly be looking at the incident and can hopefully help piece together exactly what happened.
