Last week art dealer Albert Scaglione told police that Autopilot was engaged when his Tesla Model X crashed and rolled across the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Tesla is less than convinced.
We contacted Tesla this morning about the rollover wreck, which happened a day after Tesla and the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration released details about Joshua Brown’s death behind the wheel of his Tesla Model S on autopilot from back in May.
And that’s important, because Scaglione told the Pennsylvania State Police that Autopilot was on when he hit a guardrail, bounced across the highway, hit a barrier, and rolled. He and his passenger survived the wreck.
This morning, Tesla told us that it had “no data to support” that Autopilot was engaged, but they just upgraded their statement to say that they have “no reason to believe that Autopilot has anything to do with this accident.”
Here’s Tesla’s first statement:
We have no data to suggest that Autopilot was engaged at the time of the incident. Anytime there is a significant accident, Tesla receives a crash detection alert. As is our practice with all collisions, we immediately reached out to the customer to make sure he was safe. Until the customer responds, we are unable to further investigate.
And here’s Tesla’s updated version:
We received an automated alert from this vehicle on July 1 indicating airbag deployment, but logs containing detailed information on the state of the vehicle controls at the time of the collision were never received. This is consistent with damage of the severity reported in the press, which can cause the antenna to fail. As we do with all crash events, we immediately reached out to the customer to confirm they were ok and offer support but were unable to reach him. We have since attempted to contact the customer three times by phone without success. Based on the information we have now, we have no reason to believe that Autopilot had anything to do with this accident.
Jalopnik has reached out to the Pennsylvania State Police for comment, and will update when we hear back.