Yesterday we reported on an accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike where a Tesla Model X hit a guard rail, the concrete median and then rollover. The two occupants came out alive and after the fact, the police said that the driver claimed that the Autopilot was activated when the vehicle crashed.
Tesla has now reviewed the logs and says that there’s “no data to suggest that Autopilot was engaged at the time of the incident.”
Here’s the full statement a Tesla spokesperson sent us today following the accident report yesterday:
“We have no data to suggest that Autopilot was engaged at the time of the incident. Anytime there is a significant accident, Tesla receives a crash detection alert. As is our practice with all collisions, we immediately reached out to the customer to make sure he was safe. Until the customer responds, we are unable to further investigate.”
Update: Tesla has since updated the statement which actually states that they didn’t review the data:
“We received an automated alert from this vehicle on July 1 indicating airbag deployment, but logs containing detailed information on the state of the vehicle controls at the time of the collision were never received. This is consistent with damage of the severity reported in the press, which can cause the antenna to fail. As we do with all crash events, we immediately reached out to the customer to confirm they were ok and offer support but were unable to reach him. We have since attempted to contact the customer three times by phone without success. Based on the information we have now, we have no reason to believe that Autopilot had anything to do with this accident.”
As we discussed yesterday, the accident is reminiscent of another recent Tesla Model X accident which resulted in the SUV crashing into a building and in which the driver blamed the Autopilot system, but Tesla determined it wasn’t activated after reviewing the logs.
The latest accident, the one with the Model X on the PA Turnpike, happened on July 1st, the day after the first fatality in a Model S accident while the Tesla Autopilot was activated came to light, but the fatal crashed actually happened on May 7.
The Model X driver, Albert Scaglione, is the founder and owner of Park West Gallery, a popular commercial art gallery business located in Michigan. As reported yesterday, the police investigator on the case, Dale Vukovich, said that he is likely to charge Scaglione after his investigation without specifying the charges.
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