A Tesla Model 3 went through an ultimate test of its safety. When a Tesla owner was driving his friends to their wedding — a tree fell on their car. Everyone came out of the vehicle without injuries — thanks to God and Tesla engineers for the excellently safe design.
Sam Fursey, the owner and driver of this Tesla Model 3 posted a short video of this frightening event on his YouTube channel. This video clip was recorded through the dashcam of another friend’s car chasing behind.
Despite having a glass roof, Tesla Model 3 showed exceptional resistance to such a huge amount of weight falling unexpectedly on the car. The cabin of the car stayed intact and beard the impact gracefully to save the occupants of the vehicle.
The Model 3 owner shared the story of this catastrophic event in the description of his YouTube video in the following words:
Large section of an old tree fell directly on my car, right above the driver’s seat. I was driving my best friend and his fiancé to their wedding. The footage is from the dash cam of the car behind us, driven by one of the bridesmaids. We all walked away… thank you higher powers, and Tesla engineers.
Sam Fursey / YouTube (video below).
Besides on a mission to electrify the world’s transport, Tesla as an automotive manufacturing company is also obsessed with safety. The company’s CEO Elon Musk has expressed his concern for vehicle occupants’ safety several times verbally and through his Twitter feed as well.
In 2018, NHTSA awarded Tesla Model 3 the highest 5-star rating possible in its crash test results. But the results also crowned Model 3 as the car with the lowest probability of injury that NHTSA has ever tested — and this holds true even after 3 years today.
The United States Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) also tested a Tesla Model 3 in 2019 and tested the vehicle’s glass roof by pressing it with 20,835 lbs (9,450 kg) of peak force.
IIHS found out that the roof strength of the Tesla Model 3 should get the maximum safety rating.
In this case, the weight of the large tree trunk that fell on this Tesla Model 3 is thought to be around 2,000 lbs. But adding the kinetic energy while the tree was falling, the force could be much more than 2,000 lbs.
Last year, we reported an accident from China that involved a Model 3 getting rolled over multiple times but the glass roof still did not totally collapse. My co-author at CleanTechnica, Johanna Crider also recently posted an article on how the occupants of 2 Teslas survived after the cars fell off a cliff.
Actually, Tesla does not rely solely on the crash results from different authorities, the automaker has its own dedicated crash lab for R & D and testing. The glass used in all Teslas is made by Tesla in-house using the technology they have developed as a result of their own research.
Let’s watch how and what happened in the flash of a moment. Everyone got out of the incident safely, and that’s truly the amazing part of this story.
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