An underage teen who was driving a Tesla with out a driver’s license or the owner’s permission got creative when the automotive was stopped by the police: She decided to leap within the back seat and claim the Tesla was self-driving.
The incident happened near Daytona Beach, Florida, where a Flagler County Sheriff’s deputy pulled over a Tesla Model Y driving on the fallacious side of the road.
After the vehicle stopped, it slowly backed up into the police cruiser.
When the deputy walked to the driving force’s window to see what the issue was, he didn’t find anyone in the driving force’s seat.
As a substitute, the police officer found a 14-year-old girl and a 15-year-old girl, one within the back seat and one within the front passenger seat.
Each girls claimed that nobody was driving the vehicle and that the Tesla was self-driving.
While Tesla does sell a “Full Self-Driving package,” the feature-complete version of the package is simply being tested in “Beta version” with just a few thousand cars, and it requires someone in the driving force’s seat. The responsibility all the time stays with the driving force.
The deputy quickly determined that the teenager girls were lying to cover the indisputable fact that they weren’t speculated to be driving the electrical automotive.
The teenager girls apparently drove all the way in which from Charleston, South Carolina, greater than 300 miles away, and the mother of the driving force thought that they were at her grandmother’s.
Sheriff Rick Staly commented on the situation [via the Daytona Beach News-Journal]:
These kids are very lucky that nobody was hurt and their actions didn’t have more serious consequences. It doesn’t matter in the event you are driving a ‘smart automotive,’ driving with out a license continues to be against the law. I hope these kids have learned a worthwhile lesson and I’m grateful that nobody was hurt and only minimal damage occurred to their vehicle.
The “driver” ended up receiving a citation for driving with out a license and the teenagers were left within the Florida Department of Children and Family’s custody for the night because the parents couldn’t get there immediately.
It’s not the primary time that drivers have tried guilty Tesla’s Autopilot for bad or illegal driving.
In 2018, a drunk driver tried to get out of a DUI by claiming that his Tesla was driving itself.
Tesla’s driver-assist features under its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving packages are still considered “level 2” on the self-driving scale, and so they should all the time be used with full driver attention and the driving force being able to take control in any respect times.