Tesla Autopilot Finally Saves The Day

2016 Tesla Model X

With so much bad press for Tesla’s Autopilot lately, it’s nice to see that the technology is being credited with actually saving someone’s life instead of being blamed for a death.

Recently, a man in Missouri suffered a medical emergency while driving his Model X. Joshua Neally, who is a 37-year-old attorney, felt excruciating pain from what he discovered later was a pulmonary embolism. He was able to tell the car to drive to a hospital 20 miles away, getting the care he desperately needed.

If you think that’s not a big deal, know that doctors told Neally he was lucky to have survived. If he hadn’t arrived at the hospital when he did, things could’ve turned out pretty bad. In fact, the medical condition claims tens of thousands of lives in the United States each year, so it’s not something you want to mess around with. Driving that far to a hospital while barely clinging onto life would’ve been unrealistic, so Autopilot literally saved the day for Neally.

So while Tesla’s Autopilot can save lives by avoiding collisions, it can also act like a modern day Lassie and find help when a driver is in serious trouble. Does this mean the technology is perfect? No, but it does demonstrate it’s not evil, despite how some people have been spinning the fatal crash in Florida.