NTSB: Speed caused deadly Tesla crash
18-year-old driver was going 116 mph
FORT LAUDERDALE – An 18-year-old Tesla driver’s 116 mph speed caused a cascading sequence of events that began with him losing control and crashing — and ended with a fiery explosion that killed him and his passenger, the National Transportation Safety Board has found.
The driver of the 2014 Model S sedan, Barrett Riley, and a fellow senior at private Pine Crest High School, Edgar Monserratt Martinez, also 18, died at the scene on May 8, 2018.
The most likely cause of the crash “was the driver’s loss of control as a result of excessive speed,” the NTSB’s 12-page report said.
Riley lost control while passing and changing lanes midcurve. The Tesla jumped a curb, careened into a concrete wall, rolled southward, hit another wall and burst into flames, the NTSB said. His speed was recorded at 116 mph.
Riley, of Fort Lauderdale, died of burn injuries, the report said.
Martinez, of Aventura, died of a combination of blunt-impact injuries and
burns, according to the Dec. 13 report.
Contributing to the severity of the teens’ injuries, according to the report, was the fire from the crash-damaged lithiumion traction battery.
Riley’s father is suing Tesla. The lawsuit alleges the crash was “entirely survivable” and faults the company’s defectively designed lithium-ion batteries for causing the luxury car to burst into an uncontrollable and fatal fire.
“Barrett Riley was killed by the battery fire, not by the accident,” says the lawsuit filed Oct. 8, 2019, in the Superior Court of California in Santa Clara County. Tesla’s headquarters is in Palo Alto, California.
The lawsuit’s claim reflects the Broward County medical examiner’s finding that Riley died of injuries from the fire.
Tesla could not be reached for comment. In a statement earlier this year, a company spokeswoman said “unfortunately, no car could have withstood a high-speed crash of this kind.”
The smashed and burned Tesla’s battery caught fire three times during and after cleanup of the wreck, the NTSB report said.
The first time was when it was loaded onto a tow truck. “Modules that had separated from the battery ignited on the tow truck when workers passed a chain over them,” the report said.
It happened again when the wreckage was loaded onto a second tow truck. The battery reignited a third time, the report said, when it was being unloaded at the tow yard. The fire went out on its own each time, it said.
The role of the NTSB is not to place fault or blame, the report said.
Its investigations are fact-finding missions to improve transportation safety and put forward safety recommendations.