The First Ever Tesla Autopilot Fatal Accident Might Have Happened in China

Reports coming from China are now suggesting that Joshua Brown's tragic demise was predated by an equally violent crash that took place in January on a highway in China. A Tesla Model S traveling at high speed smashed into the back of a very slow moving sweeper truck that was in the left-most lane, next to the divider.

As we've seen in previous cases such as the one of a Model S hitting a broken down van in Switzerland, the Tesla Autopilot can't detect stationary vehicles, especially when they're on the left side of the road. Since the driver failed to react in any way despite having plenty of time and space, the electric sedan hit the truck on the driver's side at full speed.

The Tesla was being driven by the owner's 24-year-old son, who was alone in the car and was killed during the impact. The dashcam footage appears to indicate that neither the driver, nor the car's systems attempted to reduce the speed, meaning they both failed to spot the hazard.

The unnamed driver's family has since sued Tesla, blaming the automaker for its vehicle's failure to avoid the crash. However, Elon Musk's recent statements suggest that he wasn't aware of any other fatal accidents involving the Autopilot except for the one that happened in May. After Electrek had contacted the company, a possible reason for that emerged: Tesla can't check whether Autopilot was on at the time.

Here is the full reply offered: "We were saddened to learn of the death of our customer’s son. We take any incident with our vehicles very seriously and immediately reached out to our customer when we learned of the crash. Because of the damage caused by the collision, the car was physically incapable of transmitting log data to our servers and we therefore have no way of knowing whether or not Autopilot was engaged at the time of the crash. We have tried repeatedly to work with our customer to investigate the cause of the crash, but he has not provided us with any additional information that would allow us to do so."

Below there's a TV report from a Chinese station where you can see the images captured by the dashcam (starts at 00:35). Until an official investigation is concluded, we can't know for sure what happened, but based on past situations, we'd say the crash is consistent with previous Autopilot behavior. But since this is China, it might be a while before the case is completely over. We'll try to keep you posted.