4 days ago
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is besides investigating nan crash
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Michael Butler, nan driver of a Tesla Model 3 that fatally struck a female successful her Texas home, manually overrode nan car's Full Self-Driving (Supervised) strategy "by pressing nan accelerator pedal to 100 percent," according to a preliminary investigation from nan National Transportation Safety Board.
While section authorities initially reported that nan Tesla's "automated driving assistance system" was engaged erstwhile Butler collapsed into Martha Avila's location successful June, nan investigation says otherwise. According to nan NTSB, nan acceleration abnormal nan FSD strategy and nan vehicle's velocity was yet "greater than 70 mph erstwhile nan clang occurred." The investigation's preliminary findings lucifer what Tesla AI caput Ashok Elluswamy shared connected X successful June. "In this case, nan driver manually overrode self-driving by pressing nan accelerator each nan measurement to 100 percent of nan accel pedal successful this residential area," Elluswamy wrote.
Yup. In this case, nan driver manually overrode self-driving by pressing nan accelerator each nan measurement to 100% of nan accel pedal successful this residential area. They reached a velocity of 73 mph during nan crash, and had nan accelerator pressed moreover aft nan crash.
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) June 22, 2026
The larger chartless is what caused Butler to accelerate. The driver said he was completing a DoorDash transportation erstwhile nan clang occurred, The Wall Street Journal writes, and that he enabled FSD while changing nan euphony connected nan Tesla's halfway touchscreen earlier he "passed out." Authorities recovered nary humor aliases intoxicant successful his system, but besides that nan brake pedal was ne'er applied successful nan last minutes earlier nan crash.
Avila's family filed a wrongful decease suit connected June 24, accusing Butler and Tesla of negligence and seeking damages for nan woman's death. Not agelong aft successful July, Butler was charged pinch manslaughter. FSD (Supervised) is expected to require progressive driver supervision to return turns, complete lane changes and different navigate to destinations. Despite that protection, aggregate crashes wherever FSD was progressive person drawn scrutiny from nan National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The NHTSA is conducting its ain investigation into this Texas crash, and successful October 2025, it besides opened a larger investigation into Tesla's self-driving technology.
