‘No one in the car’: Self-driving app raises questions after Maryland crash
“They’re just not ready for prime time,” said Michael Brooks with the Center for Auto Safety.
Brooks told the I-Team he believes releasing any beta feature to the public is dangerous.
“They’re releasing them too early before they’ve been, you know, validated as safe – before they’ve been validated to work properly,” he said.
By Susan Hogan, News4 Consumer Investigative Reporter and Rick Yarborough
October 22, 2024
A fender bender wouldn’t normally catch the attention of the News4 I-Team. But what happened to Tamara Meyer wasn’t normal.
Sitting on the back porch of her home in Potomac, Maryland, Meyer recalled what happened this summer as she visited a mall in Montgomery County.
“All of a sudden I was jolted,” Meyer said.
She was parked in the mall parking lot when another car crashed into hers.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” she said. “I saw no one in the car. There was no driver, no passenger. It was an empty car that was driving itself into my car.”
She said the Tesla scraped the back of her car as it pulled out and “kept going after impact.”
Photos of the Tesla given to the I-Team by the driver showed it had more extensive damage. As for the Tesla driver, “He was shocked as I was,” Meyer said.
“It’s not supposed to do this!” she recalled him saying.
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