“No one was driving the vehicle” when the car crashed and burst into flames, killing two men, a constable said.
Two men were killed in Texas after a Tesla they were in crashed on Saturday and caught fire with neither of the men behind the wheel, the authorities said. Mark Herman, the Harris County Precinct 4 constable, said that physical evidence from the scene and interviews with witnesses led officials “to believe no one was driving the vehicle at the time of the crash.” The vehicle, a 2019 Model S, was going at a “high rate of speed” around a curve at 11:25 p.m. local time when it went off the road about 100 feet and hit a tree, Constable Herman said. The crash occurred in a residential area in the Woodlands, an area about 30 miles north of Houston. The men were 59 and 69 years old. One was in the front passenger seat and one in the rear seat, Constable Herman said. He said that minutes before the crash, the men’s wives watched them leave in the Tesla after they said they wanted to go for a drive and were talking about the vehicle’s Autopilot feature. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said last month that it was investigating nearly two dozen crashes involving Teslas that either were using Autopilot or might have been using it.
