Two young men in Palm Coast, Florida, are in trouble after allegedly taking a joyous ride on a rented Tesla and letting it crash into a police car. And as driving without a license was not enough, the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office reports that the vehicle was also missing something entirely different when it approached: a person in the driver’s seat.
According to the sheriff’s office, a deputy on duty tried to drive a traffic stop on a 2018 Tesla Model 3 last Friday. He watched the vehicle leave a Wawa gas station just before 10 pm and started traveling on the wrong side of the road. The car stopped and then started to return to the police car, causing $ 300 in damage to Tesla.
The officer got out of his vehicle and made contact with the occupants – two women under 14 and 15 – who were supposed to be sitting in the front passenger seat and the back seat when he arrived. To be clear, there were no occupants in the driver’s seat when the deputy made contact with the teenagers, according to the police report.
The teenagers told the officer that Tesla was “driving in Autopilot mode” when he backed up the patrol car. After some questioning, the two teenagers claimed that no one was in the driver’s seat after activating autopilot. However, one of the teenagers later changed his story and said that his friend only jumped in the back seat after the vehicle got on the wrong track.
In any case, blaming Tesla’s Level 2 steering aids does not seem like a likely excuse, as the autopilot typically operates in a forward-looking direction. A post on the 2019 Tesla forum may explain what happened: the car may have been accidentally put into reverse when trying to turn off the autopilot.
The autopilot controls on Model 3 and Model Y are located on the gear selector rod to the right of the steering column. Assuming the young people are telling the truth, it is possible that the teenager who controls Tesla’s functions tried to press the steering lever to turn off the autopilot and, instead of parking the vehicle, mistakenly pressed the rod up twice and put the car in reverse.
The Drive remains unable to contact Tesla to confirm that the teenager’s claims about the car operated on autopilot were true, since the automaker had previously dissolved its public relations department.
In addition, the teenagers would have driven more than 480 kilometers. Police said The Drive that the teenagers rented the vehicle using the Turo car sharing app and delivered it to one of their homes in Charleston, South Carolina. The teenagers had arrived in Palm Coast, Florida, while visiting one of their parents. When the police contacted the mother of the teenager who was driving the car, she indicated that she did not know that her daughter had left the state and that the other daughter had provided false information from the parents to the police.
The police cited one of the teenagers for driving without a license because there are no autonomous production cars, and placed the two minors in the custody of the Florida Department of Children and Families until their parents could pick them up. The official report provided for The Drive it also indicates the confiscation of a pepper spray bottle and a “plastic bag of green leafy substance” that has been identified as marijuana.
“These children are very lucky that no one is hurt and their actions have had no more serious consequences,” Sheriff Rick Staly said in a statement. “It doesn’t matter if you’re driving a ‘smart car’, driving without a license is still against the law. I hope that these children have learned a valuable lesson and I am grateful that no one was injured and that only minimal damage occurred to their vehicle ”.
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