A woman who lives in San Mateo, California, was fortunate that she wasn’t home last Friday when an unexpected surprise showed up in her kitchen—a brand-new Tesla! The spectacular crash in a suburban area has investigators looking into whether Tesla’s self-driving technology has contributed to yet another accident.
The crash happened at 7 a.m. Friday when the driver of the Tesla somehow lost control of the vehicle. The car drove down an embankment in a suburban neighborhood. Then it jumped across a woman’s backyard swimming pool and landed in the middle of her breakfast island.
The driver and occupant of the car were uninjured and walked away from it. Investigators haven’t said for certain what caused the crash yet, but the answer seems pretty obvious to anyone who has been paying attention to Tesla’s self-driving technology for the past few years.
The car’s driver could have pretty easily hit the brakes at any time during the crash before the car did a Dukes of Hazzard move across a family’s swimming pool. But the car never slowed down, as if the driver wasn’t actually in control of it.
Investigators are now looking into whether the car’s self-driving “Autopilot” feature was enabled. Back in June, a mother and her young daughter were killed in the same town when their Tesla inexplicably veered off the road and smashed into a tree at high speed.
Since Tesla first introduced its self-driving technology back in 2019, it has caused more than 700 crashes and 19 fatalities. You have to wonder if regulators are going to step in at some point and put a stop to this technology, which appears to be far from perfect and not at all safe.
Here’s a local news report on the aftermath of this spectacular crash: