By David Shepardson
WASHINGTON, July 15 (Reuters) – The driver of a Tesla Model 3 that killed a 76-year-old woman when it ploughed into her home at high speed in Katy, Texas in June had overridden the vehicle’s advanced driver assistance system, the National Transportation Safety Board said on Wednesday.
The 44-year-old driver had engaged Full Self Driving (FSD) (Supervised) and manually overrode FSD by fully depressing the accelerator pedal and the 2025 model vehicle’s speed was greater than 70 mph (113 kph) when the crash occurred, the NTSB said, citing electronic data recovered from the vehicle.
The preliminary findings support Tesla’s argument that driver action caused the crash. The house is on a residential two-lane road with a 30 mph speed limit.
The NTSB has investigated numerous Tesla crashes where its driver assistance systems were in use. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is also investigating the crash.
Martha Avila died as a result of her injuries at a nearby hospital. Avila’s daughter, Jennifer Barbour, and her husband, Justin Barbour, said the Model 3’s driver, Michael Butler, told law enforcement he engaged Autopilot before plowing through the front wall of Avila’s home.
The NTSB confirmed the statement of Ashok Elluswamy, vice president of AI software at Tesla, who posted on X last month that “the driver manually overrode self-driving by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100%.”
Since 2016, NHTSA has opened nearly 50 special investigations of Tesla crashes believed to involve advanced driver assistance systems. About two dozen deaths were reported.
In March, the NHTSA escalated its probe into 3.2 million Teslas equipped with FSD, concerned the system may fail to detect or warn drivers in poor visibility.
Tesla has said Autopilot enables vehicles to steer, accelerate and brake within their lanes, while FSD lets vehicles obey traffic signals and change lanes.
The automaker has also said both technologies require “fully attentive” drivers whose hands are on the wheel and neither make the vehicle autonomous.
(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Stephen Coates)
