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One woman is dead after a wayward Tesla barreled into the Urbane Cafe, a strip mall restaurant in Simi Valley, California.
The driver of the Tesla, identified as a 64-year-old woman, was taken to the hospital for minor injuries, ABC News reported. The woman was riding with four juvenile passengers, one of whom also had to be taken to the hospital. At least five others were injured when the Tesla blew through the cafe’s outdoor patio area.
“We’re still trying to determine if speed was involved,” Simi Valley police Sergeant Rick Morton told ABC. “We do know that the Tesla was going northbound through the parking lot. It was attempting to make a right-hand turn to go eastbound toward Madera and, unfortunately, did not make the turn and went over the sidewalk when it struck the female victim.”
It isn’t known whether any of Tesla’s notorious driver-assistance features were engaged at the time of the crash, but it would hardly come as a shock if they were. Just a few weeks ago, another Tesla said to be driving on the company’s “autopilot system” blasted its way through a garage door in Washington state.
Coming in under the span of a month, the two incidents underscore some of the scarier aspects of Tesla’s self-driving features, whether they’re the lower-level Autopilot or the so-called “Full Self-Driving” mode.
Even on a good day, the features lull drivers into a false sense of security, leading to inattentiveness behind the wheel. And on a bad one, these features can turn Teslas into manslaughter machines, dragging riders into the paths of oncoming trains, past stopped school buses, and even into Wile E Coyote-style walls painted to look like roads.
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