“He must have driven off of the road.”
It was just a normal day in New Jersey. A woman stood near the George Washington Bridge recording a yacht.
Then out of nowhere, a Tesla came flying past and nearly drove off a cliff.
Lex (@lexlivinglife) captured footage of the shocking incident and posted it to social media.
In her post, a blue Model Y is skidding down the road. Its brakes appear to be locked as it approaches Lex, grinding against the pavement and narrowly misses hitting her. Damage is visible on the front bumper and tire.
Lex’s video then cuts to her investigating the scene of the accident.
“Well, I found the spot that it happened in,” she says, following the skid marks up the road, which is littered with some debris that appears to have come from the Tesla.
Lex shares some theories about what happened with the Tesla. “Oh, he must have driven off of the road. Cause there’s another piece, there’s like a bolt I don’t even know what that is,” she says.
She shows a long white line that was likely caused by the Tesla scraping against the road. She then points out a pair of traffic cones that appear to have recently been struck by something.
“So he must have driven, into this,” she surmises as she comes upon two large rocks that form a barrier between drivers and the cliffside.
“There’s pieces of his car, yeah, he carved this whole thing,” she says, showing that the white line continues further up the road. “He almost flew off of the cliff. Like this is the cliff that he almost flew off of,” she continues.
Then she spots tire grooves in the soil that show just how close the Tesla came to driving over the cliff.
“I don’t even understand this. Look at the dirt and everything, I don’t understand how you do this,” Lex remarks.
It’s unknown what caused the Tesla to drive so erratically. The driver isn’t visible in her video.
An iSeeCars study assessed accident fatalities across a billion miles per car brand. It found that the average automaker sees 2.8 deaths for every 1 billion miles driven in its vehicles. The fatality rate is far higher in Teslas, per iSeeCars. It reports that there are 5.6 fatalities for every billion miles driven in Teslas.
Teslas’ fatality rate wasn’t the highest, however. The Hyundai Venue, for instance, has 13.9 fatal accidents per billion miles, per iSeeCars. Following close behind at the number two and three spots were the Chevrolet Corvette and Mitsubishi Mirage.
These higher fatality rates don’t necessarily mean the vehicles are dangerous.
Of course, driver behavior affects these metrics. Lending Tree reports that Tesla ranks third in driving incident rates behind BMW and Ram drivers. Last year, Tesla drivers took the top spot.
There have been multiple reports of Teslas crashing while in self-driving mode.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) wrote about a 2017 accident involving a Tesla Model X P100D. According to the agency, the driver had autopilot engaged and was traveling at 71 miles per hour when they crashed into the median. This raised questions about whether the Tesla’s driver assistance program recognized the highway divide.
The NTSB wrote, “The probable cause of the … crash was the Tesla Autopilot system steering the sport utility vehicle into a highway gore area due to system limitations, and the driver’s lack of response due to distraction.”
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration wrote that when it came to Tesla’s Autopilot system, there was an “observed trend of avoidable crashes involving hazards that would have been visible to an attentive driver.”
Motor1 has reached out to Lex via email for further comment. We’ll update this if she responds.
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