Police were called to a quiet residential street in San Mateo on Friday morning after a woman driving a Tesla Model X reportedly lost control of the vehicle, causing it to hit a curb, careen through a yard and driveway, crash into two parked cars, go through a fence and fly over a swimming pool, and finally crash into the kitchen of another home.
Authorities were dispatched to the scene at the intersection of Murphy and Ashwood drives around 7:10 a.m., said Jerami Surratt, a public information officer for the San Mateo Police Department.
“Obviously, a major collision like this doesn’t happen every day, so several officers responded to make sure everyone was OK and no one was injured,” he said.
The driver, 70, and her daughter, 40, who was in the passenger seat, remained at the scene and were not injured, police said. The house was unoccupied at the time of the accident. Police informed the homeowner of the incident and said her daughter arrived shortly afterwards.
The cause of the crash has yet to be determined, Surratt said, estimating that the vehicle “probably went 40 to 50 feet through the air”. He noted that the Tesla was travelling downhill and was not in self-driving mode; police are still trying to determine how fast the car was going. “There were witnesses in the neighbourhood who saw the Tesla slow to a stop and accelerate very quickly, but exactly what happened is still under investigation,” he said.
The vehicle sustained “moderate to major damage” and reportedly “took out a good chunk of the wall” of the house, Surratt said. Firefighters later arrived on the scene to tow the vehicle out of the house, which was then red-tagged until it could be inspected for structural damage.
Meredith Donato, who identified herself to KTVU as the homeowner’s daughter, said she found out about the incident when her sister got an alert from the security system that someone had broken into the house.
“Honestly, I’m just amazed that no one was hurt,” Donato told KTVU. “If my mom was in the house, she would have been in the kitchen having her tea at 7 in the morning. There’s obviously property damage, but at the end of the day it’s just stuff.
