A Tesla vehicle crashed and caught fire in Houston over the weekend – resulting in two deaths.
Police believe no one was in the driver’s seat, which could mean it could be the first deaths due to a Tesla driver sitting jokingly in the back seat.
The accident happened near The Woodlands in Spring, Texas at about 11:25 p.m.
Local police said the vehicle was traveling at a high speed, missed a turn, hit a tree and quickly caught fire and left the two occupants dead.
Police told local news that no one was in the driver’s seat of the Tesla vehicle (via KPRC 2):
District 4, Const. Mark Herman, of Harris County, told KPRC 2 that the investigation showed that no one was driving the 2019 fully electric Tesla when the crash happened. There was a person in the passenger seat in front of the car and in the back passenger seat in the car.
Local media reported that the accident involved ‘autonomous driving or self-driving’:
While Tesla does sell a “complete self-driving package”, Tesla vehicles are not currently equipped with autonomous driving capability.
The current features in this package are considered as Level 2 Driver Assistance features and require a driver to always be alert and ready to take control.
A family member of the Tesla owner told local news that he jumped on the back seat of the Tesla shortly after driving out of the driveway to ride with his best friend.
The accident occurred only a few hundred meters after the ride began.
Tesla drivers are not supposed to climb out of the driver’s seat while using driver assistance features such as Autopilot, but some of them have made the dangerous use popular on social media.
Earlier this year, we reported on a TikTok star posting a video of himself in the back seat while his Tesla Model 3 was on Autopilot.
He even posted a behind-the-scenes video on TikTok to show how it was done, even though it is illegal to drive a motor vehicle in a dangerous way for the public.
Tesla’s only driver monitoring system, which ensures that someone is sitting on the driver’s seat and paying attention when using Autopilot, is a torque sensor on the steering wheel that requires someone to apply the torque.
However, some owners avoided this by placing weights on the steering wheel to mislead Tesla’s system.
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