The two friends who died in a Tesla crash on Saturday night in Texas after the vehicle crashed into a tree and burst into flames with ‘no one in the driver’s seat’ have been named and pictured.
Everette Talbot, 69, was in the passenger seat of the Model S vehicle. His name was released by police on Wednesday.
Talbot runs a financial firm called Talbot Financial. On Wednesday, his adult daughter told DailyMail.com: ‘We are going through a living hell right now, as his daughter, I asked everyone to wait for the investigation to be completed.’
The owner of the car was identified on Tuesday as anesthesiologist Dr. Will Varner, 59. He lives on the street happened, just a few hundred yards from the crash site.
Shortly after driving out of his driveway on Saturday, the car veered off of the quiet cul-de-sac and plowed into trees then caught fire. It took firefighters four hours to put out the blaze because the battery on the electric vehicle kept reigniting. Cops say they even had to phone Tesla to ask them how to put the fire out.
When they eventually put the flames out, they found Varner in the backseat and Talbott in the passenger seat.
Everette Talbot, 69, (left) was in the passenger seat of the Model S vehicle. His name was released by police on Wednesday. Talbot runs a financial firm called Talbot Financial. On Wednesday, his adult daughter told DailyMailcom: ‘We are going through a living hell right now, as his daughter, I asked everyone to wait for the investigation to be completed.’ The owner of the car was identified on Tuesday as anesthesiologist Dr. Will Varner, 59, (right) . He lives on the street happened, just a few hundred yards from the crash site.
This was what was left of the Tesla Model S after the fiery crash on Saturday in Spring, Texas
The men drove from Varner’s home, at the end of the cul-de-sac, and only made it a few hundred feet before crashing into trees
Now there are serious questions over how the car was able to move, let alone at speed, when no one was in the driver’s seat.
Harris County Constable Precinct 4 said immediately that there was no one driving the car when it crashed, which led to speculation that the pair had engaged the car’s autopilot feature.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk however insisted on Monday night that data logs show they had not engaged autopilot, nor had the driver bought the more advanced self-driving feature, Full Self-Driving Capability.
‘Data logs recovered so far show Autopilot was not enabled & this car did not purchase FSD. Moreover, standard Autopilot would require lane lines to turn on, which this street did not have,’ Musk tweeted.
To engage Tesla’s autopilot, the car must think someone is at the wheel by detecting the weight of their hands on the steering wheel. If it doesn’t, it’ll stop but it can take up to 30 seconds for it to do so.
The second question is whether or not the men were able to engage autopilot when there are no markings on the private road they were on. Autopilot must detect road markings before it can be enabled, according to Tesla.
Thirdly, how – if autopilot was engaged – did the car reach a speed fast enough to crash at the pace police say the men did?
Autopilot, according to Tesla, will never go above the speed limit and on the road in question, that limit is 35mph. Investigators have not said how fast the car was going but they have said it was at considerable speed. Tesla’s shares dipped by 3.4 percent on Monday after the crash.
Police say that Musk’s tweet claiming to have recovered data from the car was the first they’ve heard of it.
‘If he is tweeting that out, if he has already pulled the data, he hasn’t told us that.
‘We will eagerly wait for that data,’ Mark Herman, Harris County Constable Precinct 4 said.
He says witnesses have told him that the pair were driving on autopilot.
‘We have witness statements from people that said they left to test drive the vehicle without a driver and to show the friend how it can drive itself,’ he said.
It’s not clear how Musk’s claims stack up against those of the local police, whose investigators said they were ‘99.9 percent sure’ there was no one behind the wheel of the car.
Three other people have died in Tesla autopilot-related incidents.
