A Tesla Model Y Tumbled 65 Feet Down a Slope in China, Rolled Three Times, and the Family Walked Away

A Model Y owner in China has shared the story of a crash that should have been much worse. The car lost control, dropped more than 20 meters down a steep slope, rolled three times in the air and slammed nose-first into a poplar tree.

The car was wrecked beyond recognition up front, but the passenger cell held its shape, the A, B and C pillars showed no bending or collapse, the doors still opened, and both occupants climbed out on their own.

Just as important is what did not happen, since the battery pack went through repeated impacts and rollovers without leaking or catching fire, sparing the occupants the deadliest kind of secondary harm.

The owner says the car had covered more than 25,000 trouble-free miles before the crash, and credits the steel skeleton with saving his family.

The protection traces back to Tesla's steel and aluminum body architecture, with an H-shaped high-strength frame around the cabin, ultra-high-strength martensitic steel in the pillars and floor, and an aluminum front end engineered as a crumple zone, a formula that has earned five-star ratings across global crash tests.

It echoes a January 2023 case in California, where a Model Y went off a roughly 250-foot cliff at Devil's Slide and all four occupants survived with only minor injuries.

One dramatic anecdote is not crash statistics, rolling down a slope loads a car very differently than a vertical drop, and luck played a large part in the family surviving this one.