A fatal crash in which a Tesla crashed into a brick home in Katy, Texas, killing a 76-year-old woman, has raised alarms about Tesla’s driver-assistance technology. By Monday afternoon, Tesla was fighting the framing.
The accident occurred Friday night when a Tesla Model 3 driven by Michael Butler left the road and crashed into Martha Avila’s home. Butler told Harris County sheriff’s deputies that the vehicle was on autopilot at the time. The details spread quickly, and by the end of the week, the story had become the center of a long-running debate about Tesla’s Autopilot and fully autonomous (supervised) driver assistance systems.
But Tesla, a company famous for disbanding its public relations department a few years ago, broke its usual silence on Monday and stepped back.
Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s vice president of AI software and the first engineer hired on the Autopilot team in 2014, offered a very different account of what the data showed with X. “In this case, the driver manually overrode autonomous driving by pressing the accelerator pedal 100% all the way in this residential area,” he wrote. “At the time of impact, speeds reached 73 miles per hour and the accelerator pedal was pressed after impact.”
This means that no matter what system is activated, the responsibility for the results lies with the foot of the person pedaling at full speed, not the car.
Elon Musk soon amplified Elluswamy’s claims on his X account. “This (claim) makes no sense. FSD was driving slowly down the neighborhood streets and this was a high speed crash!” he wrote
Tesla discontinued its basic driver assistance system, Autopilot, in January following a California ruling that said the name could be misleading to consumers. Fully Autonomous Driving (Supervised), which requires a $99 monthly subscription, handles driver operations such as route navigation, steering, lane changes, and parking, but still requires the driver to actively supervise the system at all times.
Either way, federal regulators appear determined to draw their own conclusions. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration confirmed Monday to TechCrunch that it will launch a special investigation into the crash. The investigation is said to be the latest of more than 40 investigations the agency has launched in recent years into Tesla crashes believed to be related to advanced driver assistance systems.
The Harris County Sheriff’s Office said it will submit its findings to the district attorney to determine whether criminal charges are warranted.
Whether the Autopilot system was actually activated, overridden or malfunctioned will not be resolved until investigators fully examine the vehicle’s data logs.
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