The top-hinged Falcon Doors stand out as one of the Tesla Model X’s more unusual features, but they don’t give the electric crossover the power of flight. One owner found this out after losing control of the car, hitting objects such as a fence, and flying over a pool into a house.
First, the good news: No one was seriously injured in the incident, according to California-based news station KUTV. The owners of the house that the Model X crashed in weren’t home at the time of the accident, and the driver (reportedly a 70-year-old woman) was taken to the hospital for routine checks but walked away from the crash. Her 40-year-old daughter was in the car as well and wasn’t injured.
Now, the bad news: The amount of damage reported is staggering. While details such as the Tesla’s speed and the cause of the crash aren’t available yet, CarScoops learned that the Model X hit a curb in what looks like a residential part of San Mateo, California, traveled across a yard and a driveway, hit a pair of parked cars, drove through a fence, somehow flew over a swimming pool, and crashed into a house.
“My sister actually got an alert from the security alarm system to let her know that someone had broken into the house,” Meredith Donato told KUTV. “If my mother was in the house, she would absolutely have been drinking her tea at 7 a.m. in the kitchen.”
The impact was loud enough that some local residents initially assumed there had been an earthquake.
Police officers are working on determining the cause of the crash. Jerami Surratt, a public information officer for the San Mateo Police Department, told website SFGate that the Model X’s Autopilot system wasn’t engaged when the driver lost control and added that the car traveled between 40 and 50 feet in the air before crashing into the kitchen. “There were witnesses in the neighborhood that saw the Tesla slow down to a stop and accelerate very quickly, but exactly what happened is still under investigation,” he told the outlet.
