Tesla in Australia Struck by Mystery Object And It Could Be a World First (Updated)

 

The devastation wreaked on a Tesla windscreen. (ABC News (Australia)/YouTube)

A meteorite might have impacted an Australian man's Tesla while he was driving along a highway.

 According to Andrew Melville-Smith, a veterinarian from Whyalla, South Australia, who spoke to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the item struck his windscreen so violently that cracks spread out from the impact site and the glass seemed to weaken and partially melt.

 According to reports, the automobile was on Autopilot mode at the time, and it drove blithely on as if nothing had happened.

Melville-Smith informed the South Australian Museum about the incident and its location, and the museum is now looking into the projectile's origin.

It's one of the first known cases of a meteorite striking a moving car, if the object is indeed a meteorite.

[Update 4 November 2025: Reports indicate that the St. Louis meteorite impacted a moving car on December 10, 1950, but an earlier version of this item suggested it might be the first incidence.]

Melville-Smith told the ABC, "I thought we'd crashed, it was that loud, it was that violent, it was totally unexpected." "The car was driving along and unconcerned … it wasn't aware of the chaos that was going on in the cabin."

Even as you read this, there's a strong probability that tiny meteorites are building up in your roof gutters.

Larger pieces are more uncommon; as they fall, they often burn and break up in the environment. Seeing a meteorite land, much less being struck by one, is extremely uncommon.

In order to determine whether any particles have become embedded in the glass, the museum will first inspect the windscreen itself. The mineralogists will then go look for the meteorite itself if the findings support a cosmic origin.

Mineralogist Kieran Meaney of the South Australian Museum told the ABC, "The really unusual thing is that the glass of his windscreen has actually melted a little bit; there was a lot of heat in whatever hit the windscreen."

 Because the heat of atmospheric approach can burn and evaporate the meteorite's surface layer without transferring much heat to the core, scientists think that meteorites themselves are really very chilly when they crash on the Earth.

 On impact, however, if an object is traveling quickly enough, its kinetic energy can be transformed into thermal energy, producing a great deal of heat.

Other theories, however, such space trash, something falling from a passing airplane, or even simply a regular rock on Earth, might be more plausible.

"It may be the case once we investigate further, we find out it's something different, but at the moment [a meteorite is] the theory we are working with," said Meaney.

"If we do find out that it is a meteorite, we will probably end up going out to where this happened and trying to find the bit of rock."