Bordeaux – Four people died in western France on Saturday when a Tesla electric car caught fire for reasons that have not yet been determined, prosecutors said on Sunday. The accident happened outside the city of Niort, which caused the death of the driver and three passengers who were working at a restaurant in Melle, according to a source close to the police.
“An investigation has been opened to find out the causes and circumstances of the accident that killed many people, an investigation where the expertise of the car will be requested,” the local judge told AFP.
“Everything suggests that (the car) went off the road,” the Associated Press quoted local police spokesman Lt. Eric Hoarau said. He wrote marks on the ground and a road sign that appears to have been cut by a car when it left the road, and confirmed that the investigation is ongoing.
Hoarau told the AP that there were no witnesses to the accident and that the driver and three passengers were burned to an unknown extent and were dead by the time authorities arrived.
According to the first reports, the car hit many road signs at high speed while leaving the road, and the local newspaper Western Courier said that it came to rest many meters from where it started to leave.
This newspaper, quoting the police, said the driver was a 65-year-old man from Niort and the three passengers were employees of a restaurant he used to visit, aged 26, 21 and 16, who got into his car when he left work. .
Tesla did not immediately respond to an AP request for comment and the car company owned by billionaire tech magnate Elon Musk did not post a statement on its social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
Tesla has them often faced security issues. In April, the automaker he stayed with the engineer’s family was killed when a Tesla Model X crashed in Silicon Valley in 2018, a move that avoided a trial.
The driver was on a California freeway using Tesla’s autopilot feature when the car went into a concrete median, according to the lawsuit.
Earlier this month Tesla issued a recall of its 27,185 Cybertruck vehicles due to visibility issues with their rear-view cameras – the fifth recall for the stainless steel pickup truck since it hit the road at the end of 2023.
In December, Tesla recalled more than two million vehicles in the United States and Canada due to risks related to automated driving software and the “increased risk of collisions”, according to US national regulators.
Frank Andrews contributed to this report.
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