Tesla driver says his car malfunctioned and started accelerating after a head-on collision with a Jeep

A Tesla driver said moments after a head-on crash with a Jeep, his car malfunctioned and began accelerating on its own.

• A man says his Tesla malfunctioned, accelerating on its own after a collision in Nevada.
• The couple said the incident followed a head-on collision with a Jeep that they caught on camera.
• The Tesla driver was able to stop his car by braking, he told a local NBC affiliate.

A Tesla driver said his car malfunctioned and began accelerating on its own after a collision with another car.

It was scary enough when Radu and Angela Stefan were in a head-on collision with another vehicle while driving their Tesla on Mount Charleston in Nevada on the afternoon of July 7.

But the nightmare got worse when Radu Stefan's Tesla began accelerating on its own moments after a Jeep Rubicon turned around a corner and hit them head-on while they were stopped at an intersection, he told a local news outlet. The Jeep later drove away from the scene, according to Stefan.

"It was like a horror movie," Stefan told KSNV, an NBC affiliate station in Las Vegas. "We were just horrified, experiencing it. Just in shock."

Stefan did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

"We lost control of the car," Stefan told KSNV. "The car went towards the mountain, and I was barely able to stop it at one point, but that we saw in the rearview mirror the people who hit us, they just left."

Stefan did not say in the interview if he had any of Tesla's self-driving or driver-assist software engaged at the time of the collision.

Nevada State Police, who responded to the crash and are investigating the incident and searching for the Jeep driver, according to KSNV, did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment. Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Tesla's vehicles have drawn regulator scrutiny in recent years around their self-driving and assisted-driving features. The company recalled 2 million Teslas in 2023 amid a litany of crashes associated with the Autopilot feature and a yearslong probe from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Even so, the NHTSA opened a fresh Tesla investigation in April after the vehicle crashes continued despite the recall. One man reported that his Tesla was in Autopilot mode when it drove onto train tracks that it mistook for the road.