Posted on 03/09/2024 7:09:04 AM PST by bitt
Angela Chao, Sen. Mitch McConnell’s billionaire sister-in-law, spent her last minutes alive frantically calling her friends for help as her Tesla slowly sank in a pond on a remote Texas ranch, according to a report.
Chao, the billionaire former CEO of dry bulk shipping giant Foremost Group, tragically died at the age of 50 on Feb. 10 after accidentally backing her car into the pond while making a three-point turn.
The driving mishap was detailed in a report by The Wall Street Journal that shed light on the chaotic rescue efforts that ultimately came up short, turning what was supposed to be a celebratory weekend with friends into a nightmare.
Chao invited several of her girlfriends from Harvard Business School to spend the weekend on a gorgeous, sprawling 900-acre private property in Texas’ Hill Country, that included horse stables, a swimming pool and a 10-bedroom guesthouse, the Journal reported.
After eating dinner together and celebrating the Chinese New Year on Friday night, Chao left the guesthouse around 11:30 p.m. to head back to the main house, where her son was sleeping. It was cold out, so she decided to take her Tesla Model X SUV for the four-minute drive rather than walk.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
The water no doubt fried the electronics and prevented her from unlocking the door or rolling down the window. At that point that Tesla was just a tomb.
It shows 10 miles N of Blanco.
James 4:13-17
13Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.” 14[k]Yet you do not know [l]what your life will be like tomorrow. For you are just a vapor that appears for a little while, and then vanishes away. 15[m]Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.” 16But as it is, you boast in your [n]arrogance; all such boasting is evil. 17So for one who knows the [o]right thing to do and does not do it, for him it is sin.
Then again, Asian women are by far and away the worst drivers...
Tragic death. I don’t like driving in unfamiliar places at night and can see how this might happen.
I have read that the Tesla doors are unlocked electrically. No manual cable pull or physical linkage.
Apparently this wasn’t the first time she reversed her car and had trouble.
Cranes
Not the birds.
So many questions are being asked here that have already been addressed in the other articles that have already been posted on FR about the death of Angela Chao. Regardless, the DailyMail article that just came out earlier this morning has much more information and pictures than the WSJ piece…. One important detail it added is that with all the bodies of water on the property, the car sank in the larger of the two ponds north of the ranch house and this one was right next the guest house where her friends were staying. This is the first time that piece of information has been revealed.
Another thing to add to this…. When this was discussed earlier on FR, one of the things I had looked at was an old real estate listing of the property that had not been taken down. At this link (which was still active as of a few minutes ago), there are numerous pictures of the ranch and a video. The one thing that it didn’t do is concentrate much on the ponds that are close to what they call the 10 room guest house. https://www.landandfarm.com/property/893-acres-in-blanco-county-300276/
Regardless, there are pictures that show that much of the ponds are surrounded by large rocks that were put in place there and this raises the question of how the car ended up in the pond. Yes there are openings between some of the rocks but not that many. Here is one of the things that I’ve wondered about for those of you who are wondering about getting out of the car… if she hit just one side of a rock and did so with the car moving quite fast, is it possible that the car flipped so that it was upside down? If so, this would have added to the complexity of the whole thing because with a minute to get out, she would also have been completely disorientated. Frankly, it might be amazing that she actually was able to make any calls if it sank in a minute or so.
Kyle Bass who also has a ranch in Texas posted an X message shortly after it happened, and he stated that “there is amazing video of the car violently entering the water going backwards.” What he did not say is how he knows any of that. Was it completely pitch black dark? Was it well lit? Well, the DM article says that the emergency personnel had to put up lighting. When I did a check just now, Feb. 9 was a new moon so there would have been no moonlight.
Ridiculous. Manual release tab for all front doors on every model.
The water no doubt fried the electronics and prevented her from unlocking the door or rolling down the window.
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I think that’s likely a very good assumption. One assumes it might have had a sunroof but it too could have had the electronics foul up even before being submerged to the roof level.
There’s an easy manual release for the doors in a Tesla.
Ridiculous. Manual release tab for all front doors on every model.
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Don’t think that does much good when submerged due to the water pressure acting from the outside....
It shows 10 miles N of Blanco.
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Yes... Johnson City to the northwest is very marginally closer but it seems like Blanco is the emergency dispatch point.
Most logical explanation.
IMHO, EVs can be another way to depopulate by any means, while getting richer.
It has all sorts of sensors and cameras and auto braking systems
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True... but backing up at high speed is not the same as going forward at high speed and the sensor telling the car to brake might simply have not reacted.
You are absolutely correct.
“Chao Ping”
I new Chinese dish, per chance?
“I don’t remember what the gear selector in a Tesla is like”
Probably a pop-up on it’s I-Pad, as literally EVERYTHING else is on it, except the turn signal, and only because the feds forced them to use a real lever-switch.
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