Joshua Neally, 37, is a Springfield lawyer who lives in Branson, Missouri. His recently purchased Tesla X SUV is his dream car, and more so now after its semi-autonomous driving system helped to save his life, reports the BBC.
Just a week after buying his new car, Neally was on his way home from work, his thoughts on his daughter’s birthday celebration. After pulling onto Highway 68 that leads to Branson, he felt a sudden pain. According to local station KY3.com, Neally remembers, “A little past Highlandville it just hit where it was the most excruciating pain I’ve ever had.”
What Neally didn’t know was that he was experiencing a pulmonary embolism, a blockage of an artery in his lungs that could be fatal. Neally could have pulled off the highway and called 911 and waited for help to arrive. But he decided to use his car’s self-driving mode to find the hospital.
“It was kinda getting scary. I called my wife and just said ‘something’s wrong’ and I couldn’t breathe, I was gasping, kind of hyperventilating,” Neally says he was in horrible pain and couldn’t concentrate on driving. “I just knew I had to get there, to the ER,” he told Slate Magazine.
That is when Neally engaged the car’s AutoPilot feature, and the Tesla drove him 20 miles down the highway until he reached the road turning into the hospital. Neally then took control of the car, and pulled into the emergency entrance. Neally is now recovering from the incident, and doctors are amazed, saying he was lucky to survive it while driving.
In retrospect, Neally acknowledges that it might have been more sensible to pull over and call an ambulance. He sometimes thinks about what could have happened if he had not been driving a car with AutoPilot. He thinks that without the self-driving technology, he could have ended up as another statistic involved in an accident, and even lost his life.
As Slate points out, Neally’s story is unusual because it isn’t something that happens every day. This story, by itself, doesn’t prove that Tesla’s AutoPilot is a life-saving feature, any more than the fatal car crash in Florida in May disproves it. Let’s just say that this incident could help to paint a fuller picture of the Tesla self-driving feature.
Neally, who happens to be a very cautious driver, is thankful for the AutoPilot feature on his Tesla X. He says, “If something like that happens where I become unconscious or incapacitated while I’m driving, I’m not going to cross over the interstate and slam into somebody or slam into one of the big rock walls.”
