Vet's new Tesla apparently struck by meteor on highway

Imagine driving your brand new tesla down the highway when out of nowhere a meteor falls from the sky and smashes into the windscreen.

For more, Dr Andrew Melville-Smith joins.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Well, this next story is out of this world. Imagine
driving your brand new Tesla down the highway, went out
of nowhere, a meteor falls from the sky and smashes
into the windscreen. Well, for one South Australian motorist, this
world's first apparently event actually happened on Sunday night and
the man himself, doctor Andrew Melville Smith, joins us, now,

(00:22):
great to have you with us. Just take us through
that moment when the meteor hits you in the front
of the car.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
Morning, we're driving down the highway towards Portagusta. It was nice,
calm night, as black as black can be. There was
no rain, no lightning, listening to a podcast. The car
was in full self driving mode, so we were just supervising,

(00:52):
sitting back, and out of the blue, all of a sudden,
there was this enormous explosion, and I mean it was
violent and we were both showered in glass. It came
flying into the cabin at high speed, and the whole
cabin was full of white smoke, and my wife said,
the car's burning and it's not like the car was

(01:13):
actually on fire, and we were stunted and it took
us here quite a few seconds to sort of realize
what had happened. And I'm sitting in the driver's seat
trying to brush all this glass off me because I'm
just covered in glass, and I remember pulling my hanky out.
My wife's going the cars exploded. The cars exploded. And

(01:37):
when I sort of wiped the glass and I could
sort of see again, I realized that the car was
quite happily driving down the highway. We hadn't crashed the car.

Speaker 3 (01:45):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:46):
And when we stopped and we got out, Yeah, there's
this crater in the front windscreen and the glass appears
to have melted inside. And then so you've got this
bulge inside the windscreen.

Speaker 1 (02:00):
Believable, Yeah, just quickly. So we spoke about this yesterday.
Do you have insurance and if you're going to make
a claim, how do you explain it to them?

Speaker 2 (02:11):
Yeah, well the insurance company Elders are going to pay
for a replacement windscreen. I do wonder whether it's that's
the act of God.

Speaker 3 (02:21):
So we would have heard nothing like this before, right.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
Well, we've been to a number of windscreen places and
they just look at it and just go what they
haven't seen anything anything like it. We initially thought it
was you know, somebody who fired a bullet or something
at the front windscreen.

Speaker 3 (02:39):
Or trying a rock or something like that.

Speaker 1 (02:41):
How's the car behaving now, do you feel like maybe
this tesla's kind of supercharged, there's.

Speaker 3 (02:46):
Got a little bit of extra battery power or something.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
No, it hasn't. No, the car performed completely normally. It
was totally unaware that there was a creator in the windscreen.
It drives completely normally.

Speaker 1 (03:03):
So you need to get a lottery ticket and potentially
a new hanky by the sounds of it.

Speaker 2 (03:10):
Well yeah, okay, So anyway, when the windscreen is going
to be replaced, the expert from the South Australian Museum
is going to come and have a look at it.
And so if you can recover anything from the crater
in the windscreen, unbelievable.

Speaker 1 (03:24):
You're a science experiment now, Andrew Melville Smith, great to
chat with you and see what happens with that meet
or that struck your car.

Speaker 3 (03:32):
Unbelievable in that wild in self drive mode. Amazing