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The Joker actor is a better person than the character he plays in the new comic book film, and that became very clear after he was recently involved in a car crash.
Law enforcement has reported that Phoenix fessed up for what happened when he tried to hang a right turn while driving his Tesla in West Hollywood.
The fire truck was empty when Phoenix tried to drive by it, and he says he briefly considered just taking a wider turn when he saw it. However, he misjudged the vehicle and how wide his turn should be, and scraped against the vehicle.
Unlike the villain he plays in fiction, Phoenix seems to be a pretty stand-up guy. He found the paramedics who drove the fire department vehicle he scraped and told them what happened. From reports on the scene, the Joker actor’s vehicle took the brunt of the damage.
Joaquin’s front right quarter panel took the brunt of the damage, while the paramedic’s truck only had minor scratches on the bumper. After telling them what happened, the paramedics called out local law enforcement to take a damage report of the situation.
Law enforcement on the scene stated that Joaquin was cordial and easy to deal with and since he was so forthcoming and kind that he didn’t even get a ticket. The actor’s main concern, of course, is getting his vehicle fixed after the scrape-up.
Tesla vehicles are often overrepresented in the media when they get into accidents due to their reputation for being very safe to operate. The handful of times that a Tesla in autopilot has gotten into an accident, critics have been quick to jump on those examples as reasons why the technology is “unproven.”
However, in Phoenix’s case, the Tesla wasn’t in autopilot, as the actor himself was operating the vehicle. Even in cases where autopilot has been the culprit in accidents, Tesla has been quick to point to the sheer numerical difference in accidents caused by autopilot and accidents caused by people.
In short, human drivers are much more likely to cause accidents than computer programs. Of the thousands of people using autopilot on any given day, only a handful of them have ever been the cause of an accident. Meanwhile, there’s a car accident caused by a human driver roughly once every ten minutes in the United States.
