You don’t usually expect much to happen at 7:00 a.m. in a quiet suburb in California, but last Friday, the driver of a Tesla Model X surprised everyone when she lost control of her car and drove it into a house.
After losing control, the driver hit a curb, drove through a yard, hit two parked cars, smashed through a fence and sailed over a swimming pool before crashing into the kitchen, SFGATE reports.
Thankfully, no one was in the kitchen at the time of the crash, and neither the driver nor her daughter who was in the passenger seat, were seriously injured. Exactly what caused the 70-year-old driver to lose control has yet to be determined, but it sounds like they were traveling extremely fast, with Jerami Surratt, a public information officer for the San Mateo Police Department, telling reporters the car “probably flew 40 to 50 feet through the air, allowing it to clear the swimming pool.”
Surratt also said the car was moving downhill, and the driver was not using Tesla’s so-called Full Self-Driving mode, which is not actually fully autonomous despite the name suggesting that it is. “There were witnesses in the neighborhood that saw the Tesla slow down to a stop and accelerate very quickly, but exactly what happened is still under investigation,” he said.
“Honestly just amazed that no one was hurt… if my mother was in the house, she would absolutely have been drinking her tea at 7 a.m. in the kitchen,” the homeowner’s daughter Meredith Donato told KTVU. “There’s obviously property damage, but at the end of the day it’s just stuff.”
Resident Sean Carmichael also told KTVU that a similar crash happened about 25 years ago on that exact street, adding “Maybe it’s time to put some speed bumps down this road now.”
Photo: San Mateo Police Department
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