Philadelphia woman gives birth in Tesla on autopilot

A mother in Philadelphia has given birth to the world’s first Tesla baby, a newborn delivered in the front seat of an electric smart car while it was on autopilot. 

The remarkable birth happened in September while Yiran Sherry, 33, and her husband Keating Sherry, 34, were driving their three-year-old son Rafa to pre-school, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. 

While the family was detained in traffic, Yiran Sherry’s waters broke. The pair realised they wouldn’t make it in time as contractions intensified and traffic slowed to a crawl.

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After configuring the navigation system to the hospital, 20 minutes away in the western suburb of Paoli, Keating Sherry put the vehicle on autopilot. 

As he attended to his wife, he stated he gently placed one hand on the steering wheel of the car.

“She was squeezing my hand to the point where I thought she was going to shatter it,” Keating Sherry told The Guardian. “I was [saying] ‘Yiran, OK, focus on your breathing.’ That was advice to myself, as well. My adrenaline was pumping.”

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Yiran Sherry admitted that the decision to attempt to wait until they were at the hospital to give birth was agonising. She did, however, keep checking their predicted arrival time and noticed that it was barely moving, she added.

“Should I push or should I hold? Should I push or should I hold? Fuck it, let’s do this,” she recalled telling herself, according to People magazine.

“Oh, my God, Keating,” she whispered as she gave birth to her daughter as they arrived at the hospital. “She’s out.”

The umbilical cord of the newborn was cut over the front seat of the automobile by nurses.

Keating Sherry said, “Once the pediatrician said, ‘She’s healthy, congratulations,’ that was quite the sigh of relief.”

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Nurses kept coming into her room to see the “Tesla baby” while she was in the hospital, Yiran said. 

“Are you the one who delivered the baby in the car?” they’d inquire. Yiran Sherry expressed his thoughts. 

After considering Tess, the couple decided to name their daughter Maeve Lily in honour of the car company.

“Thank you genius Tesla engineers for your brilliant design of autopilot,” Keating Sherry said.

The birth of the baby is wonderful news for Tesla, which has been dogged by negative press over safety issues and worker mistreatment. 

Following a deadly collision, a taxi firm in Paris has decided to stop using Tesla Model 3 cars. Tesla was previously sued in Florida for an accident that resulted in the death of a teen in a Model S in 2019. 

In October, the firm was ordered to pay $137 million in damages to a Black employee who was racially mistreated. The company was co-founded by the world’s richest man, PayPal and SpaceX entrepreneur Elon Musk. Tesla has also been accused of sexual assault by a number of women.