A day at the pool in New Canaan, Connecticut, took an unexpected turn for everyone at Waveny Park this week. The intended quiet pre-opening morning for lifeguards gearing up for the summer season quickly turned into a high-stakes rescue no one expected a vehicle to be part of.
A statement released by the New Canaan Police Department explained that on Tuesday, June 16, at roughly 10:30 am, a driver was maneuvering his Tesla to park… but the vehicle accelerated unexpectedly, according to the statement.
In the ensuing event, it zipped through a cluster of trees, crashed through the facility’s security fence, and landed in the pool, according to the statement.
Mike D’Urso, a lifeguard on-site at the time of the accident, recalled the experience to News 12 Connecticut: “My coworkers and I were setting up the food court umbrellas, and all of a sudden we hear this loud crash. We turned around, and there’s just a Tesla sitting in the middle of our pool.”
D’Urso and several other lifeguards jumped into the pool alongside arriving police officers, who broke a window and forced open a door to reach the driver, who was alone in the car.
“My main concern was that the water level would rise above his head, so we had to get him out before that happened,” he told News 12.
The driver, whose identity is being withheld, was treated and taken to an area hospital for assessment, but his injuries are not serious, as confirmed by the outlet.
Tesla Pool Crash Sparks Debate Over Unintended Acceleration
Online reaction split largely into two camps. One leaned into the pun potential, with commenters calling the incident a “new definition of car pooling” and joking that the Tesla’s autopark feature was “still in beta.”
A few took it further, cracking that the car simply “saw the lanes in the bottom of the pool” and decided to dive in, or that it just wanted to cool off given the heat.
The other camp pushed back on the driver’s account entirely, with several skeptical that the car accelerated on its own. One commenter summed up the sentiment bluntly: “No car has ‘suddenly accelerated’ except when the pedal was ‘suddenly stomped on.’”
That skepticism toward unintended-acceleration claims showed up repeatedly across the comments. “lol cars usually do that when you accidentally stomp on the go pedal,” wrote another.
This Connecticut incident may also stoke old flames around Tesla’s unintended acceleration allegations. In March of this year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) shut down its inquiry into the company’s one-pedal driving mechanism. This affected around 2.26 million cars – that’s almost every Tesla that has rolled off the production line since 2013.
The NHTSA reviewed vehicle data and crash data but didn’t find a single technical defect or safety vulnerability. Crash logs indicate that vehicles responded to driver inputs and that there were no design issues. They further stated that the one-pedal mode and regenerative braking systems were becoming common among EVs, and rejected the recall petition without further action.
