Photo: Facebook
Elon Musk would be proud.
By Isaac Serna-Diez — Written on Dec 20, 2021
Tesla's autopilot function is useful for a lot of thing but I doubt Elon Musk intended it to be used for delivering babies when he designed the car.
Yiran Sherry, 33, and Keating Sherry, 34, were on their way to take their three-year-old son Rafa to preschool when Yiran’s water broke in the middle of traffic on Lancaster Avenue in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Quick thinking from Keating told him to put the Tesla they were driving in on autopilot so that he could tend to his wife who was having contractions in the passenger seat and reassure their son that everything was OK.
The couple delivered their child while the Tesla was driving on autopilot.
The Wayne natives were stuck in traffic when Keating decided to set the navigation system to the hospital, 20 minutes away in the western suburb of Paoli.
Yiran recalled earlier that night on September 9th, 2021, as she was sleeping that her contractions had started and it was almost time.
“I knew,” she said. “I said to Keating, ‘Today’s the day, but I don’t think it’s happening anytime soon.’”
However, as they got Rafa ready for school and started on their way, things changed as her contractions got worse.
“I put him in the backseat and went to check on Yiran,” Keating says. “Her water had broken a few seconds prior. She said, ‘Take Rafa to school, then come back and get me.’ But I thought: Time is of the essence.”
They weren’t going to make it to the hospital quickly enough as Yiran’s water had already broken and her contractions began to increase rapidly — they were going to have to deliver the baby in the front seat of their Tesla.
“She was squeezing my hand to the point where I thought she was going to shatter it,” Keating Sherry told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I was [saying] ‘Yiran, OK, focus on your breathing.’ That was advice to myself, as well. My adrenaline was pumping.”
He said that he had one hand lightly on the steering wheel while his other was attending to his wife.
Yiran said that her decision to wait to push the baby out until they get to the hospital or to deliver in the car was a difficult one, but that she couldn’t wait much longer after seeing the estimated arrival time stay unchanging.
“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.
The baby was delivered as they arrived at the hospital, where Yiran whispered, “Oh, my God, Keating. She’s out.”
Luckily, a pediatrician was standing at the front doors to greet the Tesla as it arrived.
The doctor then went to summon nurses who rushed over to cut the baby’s umbilical cord in the front seat of the car.
“Once the pediatrician said, ‘She’s healthy, congratulations,’ that was quite the sigh of relief,” said Keating.
Inside the hospital, nurses kept coming in to ask Yiran, "Are you the one who delivered the baby in the car?"
Everyone wanted to see the “Tesla baby,” and the couple nearly decided to change the newborn’s middle name to Tess after the car manufacturer’s name, but settled with naming her Maeve Lily.
“Thank you genius Tesla engineers for your brilliant design of autopilot,” Keating Sherry said, praising the car that helped him and his wife deliver the baby and get to the hospital safely.
"We look forward to enjoying the holidays and spending quality time with the family," Keating says. "We're going for a drive to look at Christmas lights… hopefully without any emergencies!"
Isaac Serna-Diez is a writer who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Follow him on Twitter here.