Joshua Neally, a US citizen, was driving in his Tesla Model X from office to home when he began getting breathless after suffering from a massive attack of pulmonary embolism. He started suffering with immense pain in his stomach and chest immediately after pulling onto the highway. But instead of calling for an ambulance to help him, he switched the car into auto pilot mode and decided to find a hospital by depending on the car’s self-driving mode.
A lawyer by profession, 37-year-old Neally managed to steer his Tesla to arrive at the road leading to the hospital’s emergency department.
The incident was reported by Slate, which mentioned Neally driving from his office in Springfield to Branson in Missouri, which is a 45-minute drive. He was on his way home to celebrate his daughter’s fourth birthday when the incident took place.
The report mentioned that Neally steered his luxury SUV, the Tesla Model X, in rush-hour traffic on Highway 68 when he turned on the auto-pilot mode. Tesla’s Model X has a unique feature that allows the car to pilot it, which includes braking, accelerating and steering to an extent, usually during long stretches of freeway driving.
In a previous incident, a driver named Joshua Brown, was killed in crash in Florida when he used a similar car in auto-pilot mode. Though Tesla’s car with an auto-pilot feature is not a true-self-driving car, the technology is being developed to help replace humans as drivers with the help of software.
Neally was around 5 miles away from the office when he started witnessing the usual traffic on his route. After a few minutes, he started getting very uncomfortable about an excruciating pain in his abdomen, moving upwards towards his chest. “It felt like “a steel pole through my chest,” said Neally. He called his wife immediately and told her that he was heading to the emergency room, but does not remember anything after that. On arrival to the hospital, the doctors in Branson toll Neally that he suffered from pulmonary embolism, a potentially fatal obstruction of a blood vessel in his lungs.
Slate further reported, ‘If you ask Neally, however, he’ll tell you he was lucky to be driving a Tesla. As he writhed in the driver’s seat, the vehicle’s software negotiated 20-plus highway miles to a hospital just off an exit ramp. He manually steered it into the parking lot and checked himself into the emergency room, where he was promptly treated. By night’s end he had recovered enough to go home.’
