Meteorite theory after object hits Australian man's Tesla in Autopilot

What happened on the South Australian highway

An object that hit an Australian man’s Tesla while he was driving on a highway may have been a meteorite.

Andrew Melville-Smith, a veterinarian from Whyalla in South Australia, said the impact on his windscreen was so forceful that the glass seemed to soften and partly melt, with cracks spreading out like a spider’s web from the strike point.

The Tesla, which was reportedly running in Autopilot mode at the time, simply carried on as if nothing unusual had occurred.

"I thought we'd crashed, it was that loud, it was that violent, it was totally unexpected," Melville-Smith told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). "The car was driving along and unconcerned … it wasn't aware of the chaos that was going on in the cabin."

South Australian Museum investigation

Melville-Smith reported both the incident and the location to the South Australian Museum, which is now looking into the event to establish what the projectile was and where it came from.

The museum’s first step is to inspect the windscreen itself to check whether any fragments may be lodged in the glass. If what they find is consistent with a space origin, the mineralogists will then attempt to locate the meteorite on the ground.

"The really unusual thing is that the glass of his windscreen has actually melted a little bit; there was a lot of heat in whatever hit the windscreen," mineralogist Kieran Meaney of the South Australian Museum told the ABC.

Why a meteorite is being considered

Should the object prove to be a meteorite, it would be among the first documented cases of a meteorite striking a vehicle that was in motion.

Update 4 November 2025: An earlier version of this article suggested it may be the very first instance, but reports suggest the St. Louis meteorite struck a moving car on 10 December 1950.

Space material falls to Earth all the time, adding up to roughly 5,200 tonnes each year. Most of that total is made up of tiny dust-like particles that you would not identify as cosmogenic unless somebody pointed it out.

It is entirely possible that minute meteorites are collecting in your roof gutters even as you read this.

Bigger pieces are far less common, as they usually burn up and break apart during their descent through the atmosphere. It is extraordinarily rare for anyone to witness a meteorite land-rarer still for one to hit somebody or something.

Researchers generally think that meteorites themselves are quite cold by the time they reach the ground; the heating during atmospheric entry can scorch and vaporise the outer layer without significantly warming the interior.

Even so, if an object is travelling quickly enough, the collision can generate substantial heat as kinetic energy is converted into thermal energy.

That said, other possibilities may be more plausible, such as space junk, debris falling from an aircraft passing overhead, or simply an ordinary rock from Earth.

"It may be the case once we investigate further, we find out it's something different, but at the moment [a meteorite is] the theory we are working with," Meaney said.

"If we do find out that it is a meteorite, we will probably end up going out to where this happened and trying to find the bit of rock."