Two dead in Tesla car crash ‘with no one in driver’s seat’

Elon Musk’s Tesla brand is fast-becoming the most luxurious and technologically-advanced car brand in the world, but the brand has faced a major setback after a car hit a tree and burst into flames, killing both occupants inside it in which, police say, no one was in the driver’s seat.

According to reports, the Tesla vehicle was running on autopilot before running off the road and crashing into a tree just outside Houston, Texas this week.

“There was no one in the driver’s seat,” Sgt Cinthya Umanzor of the Harris County Constable Precinct 4 told media shortly after the accident occurred.

As the investigation continues, it’s been reported that the 2019 Tesla Model S was “traveling at high speed when it failed to negotiate a curve and went off the roadway, crashing to a tree and bursting into flames,” according to television station KHOU-TV.

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After the fire was extinguished, police found two people deceased in the car – one in the front passenger seat and the other in the back seat.

The accident is the latest in a string of crashes as a result of Tesla’s semi-automated driving system as it prepares to launch a “full self-driving” software to more customers in the near future.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, however, said company checks showed the car’s autopilot driver assistance system was not engaged at the time of the crash. "Data logs recovered so far show Autopilot was not enabled & this car did not purchase FSD," he said in a tweet.

Mark Herman, Harris County Constable Precinct 4, says that Texas police are eagerly awaiting the data logs from Musk and the team at Tesla to help assist them in their investigation.

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Herman adds that “we have witness statements from people that said they left to test drive the vehicle without a driver and to show the friend how it can drive itself.”

Tesla's infamous new autopilot feature is a driver assistance system that handles some driving tasks which allows drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel at times. However, Tesla says that use of the feature "requires active driver supervision and does not make the vehicle autonomous."

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Musk explains that "standard Autopilot would require lane lines to turn on, which this street did not have." He explains that road markers that need to be captured by a vehicle's cameras to enable autopilot which could have never happened on the particular road the vehicle crashed on.

While some have praised Tesla's Autopilot system, others have scrutinised the software which was operating in at least three Tesla vehicles involved in fatal car crashes in America since 2016.

Image courtesy: Twitter