Tesla Autopilot Blamed For Another Crash

A weird story just keeps getting weirder. A guy in Minnesota claims his Tesla Model S crashed and rolled into marsh, with Autopilot active. This isn’t the first time the semi-autonomous tech has been blamed for an accident, and it probably won’t be the last.

Apparently, the Tesla was headed toward a three-way intersection. The road it was on didn’t go through, forcing you to turn left or right. Instead of turning, the car went straight and into a marsh. Apparently, Autopilot was made to deal with such situations?

Now the guy is now backpedaling, saying the accident was his error, and not Autopilot’s.

His story is that he was in shock right after the accident, said a few things that were misinterpreted, and now he’s setting the record straight. Naturally, online conspiracy theorists have descended, making the obvious connection that Tesla threated the guy with some dirt, because this whole wreck would blow the roof off Elon Musk and Hillary Clinton’s secret love child.

In reality, he probably received a friendly reminder that Autopilot doesn’t do three-way intersections. The problem is the name “Autopilot” leads people to believe you can just take your hands off the steering wheel, take a nap, watch Netflix, and chill – because the car’s handling everything, right? Wrong. Autopilot is only a Level 3 autonomous feature. It would take Level 5 tech to do everything you and I do behind the wheel.

So there you go, another strange case of a Tesla crash, complete with a growing media circus around it.