A South Australian couple believe they’re lucky to be alive after their brand new Tesla was hit by a suspected meteorite.
Andrew Melville-Smith and his wife Jo, were driving their new car home from a dealership in Adelaide when their windscreen was suddenly struck. The impact was so strong it sent shards of glass flying at the couple and filled the car with smoke.
Luckily, the electric vehicle was in self driving mode and continued along its route unperturbed – something Mr Melville-Smith says could have very well saved their lives.
“If I’d been driving, we would have gone off the road,” he told the South Australian Museum.
“I was out of it. It was extremely violent and we were blasted by high-speed glass shards.
“I thought we’d crashed.”
The couple had been travelling along a remote stretch of the Port Augusta Highway on their way back to Wyalla – which is about a four-hour drive from Adelaide.
It was a quiet night with no storms and there was nothing around them at the time that could obviously explain the mystery object that struck them.
A review of the car’s cameras was also fruitless – whatever hit them had been too fast for the video to capture.
After pulling over to inspect the damage, the couple made it home safely and are now awaiting results from the South Australian Museum which will investigate whether what hit their car was actually a meteorite.
That possibility was initially thought to be extremely low, as the chances of a meteorite hitting a moving object are “immeasurably low”, according to the museum’s Minerals and Meteorites Collection Manager, Dr Kieran Meaney.
However, upon closer examination of the impact site, certain elements have led Dr Meaney to suspect something incredibly rare may have happened.
“The glass of his windscreen seems to have melted a little bit, and the acrylic layers in the glass have discolouration, almost like they’ve been burnt,” Mr Meaney said.
“It was certainly hit by something and it was something hot, and we don’t have another good explanation for what else it could have been.”
The rock itself has not been recovered but the museum will examine the impact site on the windscreen. If tests suggest that it was in fact a meteorite, efforts will be taken to locate it.
