Tesla “Strikes” Service Patrol Truck Early Wednesday, Causing I-95 Gridlock In South Florida

An early morning wreck on Wednesday involving a Tesla and a service patrol vehicle caused a massive backup on I-95 near Miami-Dade county.

The scene was “along the northbound lanes of I-95 at Northwest 103rd Street, where the crash caused express lanes to be closed just after 5 a.m,” according to NBC 6 South Florida. 

The Florida Department of Highway Safety said the Tesla “struck the truck” of the Road Rangers while they were blocking lanes from a previous crash. “The Road Ranger Service Patrol provides traffic incident management response services and limited no-cost highway assistance to motorists to improve highway safety for emergency responders and the motoring public,” according to the Florida DOT website. 

Both Road Rangers were taken to to Jackson North Hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. The driver of the Tesla suffered “severe” injuries.

This type of incident doesn’t appear to be isolated – it’s eerily reminiscent of a story we posted just days ago where a Tesla hit two Chinese policemen, killing one of them, while they were stopped on the road dealing with an accident. That incident occurred in Taizhou, Zhejiang province.

“Two Chinese policemen were injured in a collision Monday,” Tesla’s Weibo account confirmed, early Tuesday morning. Tesla reportedly “made a report to an unidentified government agency on the accident” after it occurred. 

The company said it would “work with the government” to investigate the accident. Differing from Tesla’s Weibo narrative, Reuters reported Tuesday morning that the accident, according to local police, caused the death of one police officer. 

Xinhua has reported that the driver of the Tesla was “detained by police”, according to the same Bloomberg report. We first posted about the accident on Monday after a prominent China-watcher posted that a Tesla had “run over two traffic cops in Zhejiang”. 

While China seems to be eager to take strides to rope Tesla in and ensure the safety of its citizens, sadly the NHTSA in the U.S. still seems to no show zero interest in doing the same.