Though reports are circling with regard to what exactly Joshua D. Brown, the driver killed in the Tesla Model S crash in May, was doing at the time of the accident, we’d like to put out a reminder that still nothing has been made clear.
The police did find a portable DVD player in the car, and there are claims that a Harry Potter movie was heard playing in the car after the crash. “Neither the laptop nor a DVD player . . . found in the vehicle was running after the crash,” Sergeant Kim Montes of the Florida Highway Patrol told Reuters. Investigators were not able to determine whether the driver was operating either at the time of the accident, however.
Which means that we can’t definitively say that Brown was or wasn’t watching a movie during the time of the crash. Just because the DVD player wasn’t running by the time the authorities showed up doesn’t mean that it was off the whole time. The impact could have shut it off or maybe it just shut off on its own. Maybe it ran out of battery. Maybe it wasn’t running to begin with.
We don’t know, and likely won’t for some time.
It will be difficult for the authorities to determine what exactly caused the crash because of the myriad of variables. We’re still in the early stages of this investigation, and any apportionment of blame for the fatal incident is way too premature.