Image credit – Sabine Hermsdorf
Last month Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk made a pretty boastful proclamation in which he stated that Tesla’s Autopilot feature actually helps to reduce chances of an accident by 50%. We suppose to his credit, there have been stories of autopilot kicking in and helping drivers avoid potential disasters, but that’s not all.
Recently in Germany, it seems that it’s thanks to Tesla’s skateboard chassis design that actually helped to save the lives of five joyriding teenagers. According to the reports, a group of teens were out joyriding in the Tesla Model S belonging to one of the teens’ father. However the driver lost control of the vehicle and sent it flying 80m into a field, rolling one before coming to a stop.
Three of the teens had to be airlifted to the hospital but for the most part, none of them suffered injuries that were life-threatening, which apparently is thanks to the Tesla’s skateboard chassis. For those unfamiliar, Tesla’s Model S and Model X cars feature a skateboard chassis design in which the front of the car where an engine would typically be housed is more or less “empty”.
This means that in the event of a crash like the one we’re talking about right now, the front and rear-end portions of the car can crumple and effectively dissipate the kinetic energy from a crash, meaning that less of that energy is transferred into the occupants of the car, and also means that there is no petrol-fueld engine to potentially catch on fire/explode.
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