Model X navigates sick driver to safety

Joshua Neally, a 37-year-old attorney in Springfield, Missouri, claims that his Tesla Model X’s Autopilot feature saved his life.

Neally describes the pain akin to a steel pole through his chest while driving home in late July.

“I was in gathering highway traffic as the pain mounted rapidly,” he says. “I calculated I could reach the hospital faster by autopilot than if I stopped and called an ambulance.”

So he let his Model X take over for more than 32km, until reaching an off ramp near a hospital in Branson. Neally steered the car the final stretch himself, and made his way to the emergency room.

He survived despite suffering a pulmonary embolism, a blockage of lung arteries that kills 50,000 people a year. Seventy percent of those deaths come within an hour of the onset of symptoms.