San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan, shown on the sideline during a game last year, says he had his Tesla on autopilot when it crashed last month.
San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan, shown on the sideline during a game last year, says he had his Tesla on autopilot when it crashed last month.
San Francisco 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan, during an impromptu news conference Saturday, said his Tesla was in self-driving mode when he crashed it in Palo Alto last month.
Shanahan could not explain how his 2023 Model S swerved over a double yellow line into oncoming traffic on July 14, colliding with 2025 Mercedes-Benz GLC 300 driven by a 21-year-old woman, while on autopilot. The 10th-year head coach suggested he may have inadvertently switched the mode off as he turned from grabbing his phone, which he recalled fell to the backseat, unless there was some malfunction with the Tesla feature.
“I’ve had autopilot for nine years, so I’m pretty comfortable with it,” said Shanahan, who previously said he was driving under the posted 25-mph speed limit around 20 mph ahead of the crash, “and who knows what happened when I turned around, whether it malfunctioned or whether I knocked it off. That’s something that I don’t know yet.
“But regardless, it is always your fault, whether you’re in autopilot or not. You can’t take your eyes off the road. It’s a partnership driving. You don’t just turn it over to a computer, and it’s a good lesson no matter how comfortable I am with that, that I believe someday could save my life or someone else’s.”
San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan, shown in May, spoke Saturday about his crash in Palo Alto last month.
San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan, shown in May, spoke Saturday about his crash in Palo Alto last month.
Saturday was the first time Shanahan addressed a large group of media in the auditorium at Levi’s Stadium since his car crash. He still wore a soft cast on his left hand but no longer sported the sunglasses — “to protect scars” — that had become a staple of his appearance this training camp. The stitches on his face were no longer there, a piece of tape across his nose surfacing in their place.
He spoke to a small group of reporters on July 27, intent on clarifying that he was at fault for the crash despite information from a statewide crash database placing blame on the 21-year-old woman, as the Chronicle and Sports Illustrated reported. Palo Alto police confirmed that a clerical error occurred when information from the crash report was transferred to the larger database.
Shanahan appears to be recovering well from his injuries and said he expects to coach his team in its first preseason game against the Titans on Thursday.
“Anytime you cause an accident that could be avoided, you feel pretty stupid,” Shanahan said. “I mean, especially when you have a chance to hurt someone else. … I think everyone’s done, to a degree, what I’ve done, but dropping a phone and falling all the way to my backseat where I have to fully take my eyes off the road, it’s something that I normally wouldn’t do.”
Noah Furtado covers the San Francisco 49ers and college football in the Bay Area as a football trending reporter. Before graduating from Arizona State University in 2024, Furtado interned at the Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism department of the New York Times, where he wrote about Major League Baseball. He also contributed to the Minnesota Star Tribune, where he covered a variety of pro sports teams, and the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, where he reported on local high school sports. Furtado also previously freelanced for the Los Angeles Times and the Chronicle.
Furtado grew up in Hawaii and is an alumnus of the nationally recognized, highly competitive Sports Journalism Institute, a nine-week training and internship program designed to prepare college students for careers in sports journalism.
Charisse Delgado receives a flu shot from LVN Sheila Aldana at a Kaiser Permanente clinic in Santa Clara on Oct. 3, 2019. The FDA has now approved the first mRNA flu vaccine, giving adults 50 and older a new option for the 2026-27 flu season.