The Death of Angela Chao
wsj.com
wsj.com
What’s most interesting is that for all her money, it didn’t help in the end. None of the emergency responders knew her background nor cared. We all wind up the same in the end.
Angela Chao died on February 11, 2024, at the age of 50.
According to the Blanco County sheriff, she died after her Tesla went into a pond on her private ranch (named JWCB Ranch, or JW Ranch for short), which is located at 101 Schneider Lane in Johnson City, about 40 miles west of Austin.
She was under water for over an hour as rescuers tried to reach her and extricate her from the submerged car. Upon her removal from the car, EMS workers delivered "advanced life support" for 43 minutes, but were unable to revive her.
Assuming the address is correct:
https://www.landandfarm.com/property/893-acres-in-blanco-cou...
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/101-Schneider-Ln-Johnson-...
> The local EMS station has one ambulance to cover 7,000 people spread out over 200 square miles. Properties more than two miles away from the station are generally given the weakest insurance safety rating of 10 based on how quickly help can arrive. The ranch is twelve miles from the station. New York, Austin and other major cities have a rating of one, by contrast.
> “There are quite a few wealthy people that have these ranches, which are just big ranches with the nice homes,” said Kenneth Welch, a retired engineer who has lived in Blanco County for 17 years. “They’re gated and you can’t just drive in.”
By contrast I live in a major American city, with a world renowned hospital only 0.3 miles away from me (and all the other people) and a police station similar distance. It’s simply a fact that moving to a rural gated ranch will make freak accidents harder to respond to.
There's no point here, I merely added the accident details as I was curious, and the location photos for the same reasons.
I'm over 60 and have spent most of my life in places far more remote than this, albeit in the company of people that deal with accidents, fires, floods, medical dramas as they happen without waiting for big city emergancy services.
> move to very remote, inaccessible mansions
It really doesn't seem that remote, I can see other properties in the neighbourhood, it appears to be 10 mile or so from Johnson City (~2,000 people), etc, the property is under a thousand acres.
This is all relative, of course; I live in a state 3x bigger than Texas and the vast bulk of the population of ~ 2 million live in the one corner making the rest of the state easily more remote than this.
If you live in a large city then I guess all places "not a city" must seem equally remote to you, but I can assure it's very much not so - I worked in geophysical exploration in two thirds or so of the 190+ countries across the globe and on a remote scale of (say) New York City to Baliem Valley this is pretty much G20 city outskirts.
Here (EU) we have "10' intervention guarantee" in cities, 30' outside, but horror stories in big cities are far more common than outside.
There are some scenarios in which a vehicle is accidentally backed into a pond up to the point where the occupants are in grave risk of drowning, but not many. If this is not one of these scenarios, then the possibility that the vehicle was in an autonomous mode is one that should be considered (this applies to any vehicle with a level of autonomy sufficient to render such an event possible, not just Teslas.)
The victim apparently said that it was one of those scenarios in a call to a neighbor when it occurred, so I don’t know why we need to speculate on autonomous driving being involved. It seems a lot more likely that, if a defect was involved, it was a “manual driving” control defect that contributed to the victim’s reported unintentional shift into reverse during the three-point turn, not a problem with autonomous driving.
Now I'm wondering if the vehicle in question accelerates about as fast in reverse as it does forwards. This is certainly possible with an electric drive, but it's probably not desirable.
In a normal car wouldn’t you be able to open the door once the interior fills with water or before the car is fully submerged?
She perhaps intended to tap Reverse on the center console but accidentally tapped Park because it is next to it. With Auto Shift Out of Park, the Tesla selects drive or reverse. That is she may have thought she tapped Reverse but the car ended up in drive mode. I can see myself doing this when I am drunk, driving around in my private ranch.
1). https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modelx/en_us/GUID-E9B387D...
2). https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modelx/en_us/GUID-E9B387D...
Text-only, no Javascript:
tnftp -o'|grep -Eo "\"body\":\".+\"readTimeMin\""' \
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/BB1jAkIW \
|(echo "<meta charset=utf-8>";sed 's/\"body\":\"//;s/\\//g;
s/\",\"readTimeMin\"//') > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htm
links -force-html 1.htmhttps://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/tesla-recalls-200000-...
Unless it was the neighbor who detailed her call at the time who exploited it and then invented the narrative of the call to cover it up, that particular exploit being responsible for the incident seems unlikely, since it is inconsistent with the description of the incident that the neighbor detailed her recounting (that she made a mistake she had made before with the gearshift and put the car in reverse instead of drive while making a three-point turn, and then the car zipped backward over the embankment and into the pond.)