A Tesla owner has claimed that the company's full self-driving system prevented a potential fatal accident after he lost consciousness while driving.
Narrating the entire incident, the person, named Rishi Vohra, wrote on February 19, "My Tesla literally saved my life yesterday. What started as a normal drive turned terrifying fast."
This happened after he "unintentionally fasted for 17 hours, took some medicine, and had a severe allergic reaction." Vohra shared that his health condition worsened while he was driving and speaking to his wife on the phone.
"My body shut down — I passed out while driving on the freeway, mid-conversation with my wife on the phone," he wrote.
This is when Tesla's Full Self-Driving system came to his rescue. At first, it detected that the driver lost consciousness and immediately slowed down.
"It detected I lost consciousness (thanks to the driver monitoring system), immediately slowed, activated hazards, and safely pulled over to the shoulder. No crash. No danger to anyone else on the road," Vohra wrote.
As he stopped responding, Vohra's wife realised that something was wrong. She immediately used Life360 to alert emergency services, who located him within five minutes.
"They attended to me enough for me to tell them, 'I don't want to abandon my truck here on the freeway.' So the Tesla autonomously drove me the rest of the way to the ER. I walked in, got admitted, and they stabilised me overnight," he wrote.
Sharing a video and a photograph of himself in a hospital bed, Vohra noted that he was later discharged after his levels were back to normal. He thanked his wife for "staying calm and acting fast" as well as Musk for "engineering cars that literally protect lives when the driver can't."
"This isn't just convenience — it's life-saving tech," he concluded.
Elon Musk Reacts
As Vohra's post started gaining attention on the social media platform, Musk took note of the matter and wrote, "Glad you're ok!"
In November last year, Musk reposted a video of a driver narrowly escaping an accident because of Full Self-Driving (FSD).
This is an advanced driver-assistance system from Tesla, and it utilises cameras and neural networks, along with artificial intelligence (AI) to handle steering, acceleration and braking.
At the time, the X user, named Clifford, wrote that they avoided a head-on collision with traffic coming from the other side while travelling through New Mexico from the Tesla shareholders' meeting.
The Full Self-Driving (Supervised) helps people with driving manoeuvres "intelligently" and "accurately". It is often used by drivers to navigate, steer, make lane changes, as well as parking.
At the moment, it is available in countries such as US, Canada, China, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Australia and New Zealand.
