Two men died after a Tesla vehicle that authorities said was operating without anyone in the driver’s seat crashing into a tree north of Houston Saturday night.
One of the men was in the front and the other was in the backseat of the Tesla, which drove around a corner at high speed before hitting a tree around 11:25 p.m. local time, Harris County Precinct 4 Constable Mark Herman said in an interview.
“Our preliminary investigation finds – but has not yet been completed – that there was no one behind the wheel of that vehicle,” said the officer. “We are almost 99.9% certain.”
It took rescuers about four hours and about 32,000 gallons of water to put out the fire that engulfed the electric vehicle, Constable Herman said. According to the National Transportation Safety Board, high-voltage batteries, such as those used in Teslas, can reignite after being damaged, even after firefighters put out a fire.
As of Sunday, authorities were still investigating whether the front passenger airbag had been deployed and whether the vehicle’s advanced driver assistance system had been engaged at the time of the crash. Neither Tesla Inc. TSLA,
nor the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the highest-ranking U.S. auto safety regulator, responded to requests for comment.
An expanded version of this report is published on WSJ.com.
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