San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan is back with the team and even looking forward to coaching in the preseason despite the crash he was recently in. And while he's ready to put the incident behind him, he did have some more details to share.
Speaking to the media on Saturday, Shanahan said that he had been driving his Tesla (a 2023 Model S) around 20 miles per hour when his phone fell out of reach. He then revealed that he had been engaging the Tesla's autopilot and trusted it to keep going while he searched for the phone.
“I mean, anytime you cause an accident that could be avoided, you’d feel pretty stupid,” Shanahan said. “I mean, especially when you have a chance to hurt someone else. And so, like, I think you’d get mad when you get a ticket, at yourself. So it was kind of the same. You know, things that, you know, I think everyone’s done to a degree what I’ve done. But, you know, dropping a phone and falling all the way to my back seat where I have to fully take my eyes off the road. You know, it’s something that I normally wouldn’t do.
“I’ve had autopilot for nine years, so I’m pretty comfortable with it and, you know, who knows what happened when I turned around? Whether it malfunctioned or whether I knocked it off? That’s something I don’t know yet. But regardless, that’s — it is always your fault, whether you’re on autopilot or not. You can’t take your eyes off the road. It’s a partnership driving, you don’t just turn it over to a computer, and it’s a good lesson, no matter how comfortable I am with that, that I believe someday could save my life or someone else’s, or it’s really helped me have perspective on that stuff.”
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Lesson Learned?
Shanahan said that he didn't know whether the autopilot malfunctioned or if he disengaged it by mistake when the accident occurred, but he isn't blaming Tesla for the accident. He made it clear that the lesson to take away is to never take eyes off the road.
“I mean, I didn’t, like, sit there and feel like I had to — I didn’t have, like, a ton of guilt over it or anything,” Shanahan said. Like, I think, you know, the word’s an ‘accident,’ and it truly was that way. But you realize how quick and close that stuff can happen. And, you know, when, you know, when you’re going at 20 miles an hour, you’re not really — and you’re on autopilot — I obviously have zero worries. I have so much trust in that stuff. And that was a good lesson that you can’t ever have zero worries. But I think it definitely could be example for a lot of people.”
