The owner of a Tesla Model Y that crashed into a Texas home’s garage back in May has now spoken with media to provide their account of the accident, after a Tesla executive recently said that Autopilot saved them from a “pedal error.”
“I was going very slow, and all of a sudden, this Tesla car, like accelerated by itself, and hit the car in the front,” Swarajyalaxmi Rao, who was at the wheel of her sister’s week-old Model Y during the incident, told KXAN.
The car in front belonged to Swarajyalaxmi’s son, Jai Rao. After colliding with the car, Swarajyalaxmi claimed the Tesla put itself in reverse, sped back across the street, and crashed into a garage down the road before finally stopping.
“All this time I didn’t know what’s happening. I was braking,” Swarajyalaxmi said. Fortunately, no one was harmed in the accident. The Tesla was totaled, and repairs for damage to the car in the front and the neighbor’s property ran into the thousands of dollars.
Neighbors’ cameras recorded the incident, and Jai later uploaded the footage to YouTube.
Tesla’s Director of Autopilot Software, Ashok Elluswamy, cited footage of this incident during a keynote presentation at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2022 in June as evidence of Autopilot preventing an average of 40 “pedal error” collisions per day.
“While it’s incredibly sad, I’m glad that no one was harmed in this accident,” Elluswamy said. Elluswamy described pedal errors as instances where the driver accidentally presses the accelerator instead of the brake.
According to the Tesla exec, Autopilot is able to detect such human errors, which in many cases would cause a collision. Tesla’s Autopilot software then intervenes to prevent a collision.
However, Swarajyalaxmi insists the crash was caused by a car malfunction. “I didn’t do anything. It was on manual, and I did not do any reverse.”
“I don’t believe there is — there isn’t any problem. There is a problem,” she added. “And I want to find out that, and Tesla should find out. This is going to happen to … other people.”
Dragan Djurdjanovic, a mechanical engineering professor and expert at the University of Texas in Austin, believes the truth of what happened could probably be found in Tesla’s data for the subject vehicle. “You press the pedal, and the electric command goes to the car. And there could be a breakage in that electric link,” he explained. However, Tesla’s data likely tells the real story–and that was shared in Elluswamy’s presentation.
Jai Rao, meanwhile, implored Tesla to investigate the accident. “Please, Tesla, if you are listening, come out, investigate”
The Rao family has filed a report with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Earlier this month, the NHTSA launched a probe into two fatal crashes involving Tesla vehicles and motorcycles. The NHTSA is also conducting an investigation into how Autopilot handles emergency vehicles on the road.
