NTSB says Tesla crash driver floored accelerator

A preliminary NTSB report says the driver in a fatal Tesla Model 3 crash in Katy, Texas, manually overrode Full Self-Driving (Supervised) by pressing the accelerator to 100 percent just before impact.

The 2025 Model 3 was traveling at more than 70 mph on a residential street with a 30 mph speed limit on June 19, when it jumped the curb and crashed through a brick wall into a home west of Houston. Martha Avila, 76, who was standing in the front room, died from her injuries.

Driver Michael Butler, 44, told police after the crash that he had passed out while using Tesla’s driver-assistance system. But investigators also found Google searches on his phone including “Tesla FSD not aggressive enough” and “Tesla FSD too timid,” adding to questions about how he was using the system before the collision. Butler has been charged with manslaughter, and Avila’s family has filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against both Butler and Tesla.

The finding clears Tesla’s FSD software in this crash, but not the wider scrutiny around the company’s driver-assistance tech. In March, NHTSA upgraded its investigation of FSD to an engineering analysis, one step short of a recall, covering more than three million vehicles after documenting crashes in which the system failed to detect poor visibility conditions until immediately before impact.

Over the past decade, the agency has opened 46 special crash investigations into Tesla’s self-driving or driver-assistance technology, with fatalities in more than a dozen cases. Tesla later renamed the feature from “Full Self-Driving” to “Full Self-Driving (Supervised)” after regulators said the original name was misleading. The company also faces a certified class-action lawsuit in the US over FSD advertising and statements made between October 2016 and August 2024.

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The NTSB’s account matches what Tesla head of AI software Ashok Elluswamy said shortly after the crash: vehicle data showed the driver pressed the accelerator to full throttle. Even so, Tesla’s broader safety claims remain disputed. The company says FSD Supervised sees one major crash per millions of miles, while its Austin robotaxi fleet has reported crashes at roughly four times the human average. NHTSA also opened a separate probe last year into 58 incidents in which Teslas reportedly broke traffic laws while using self-driving technology, resulting in more than a dozen crashes and nearly two dozen injuries.

The timing is awkward for Tesla. Elon Musk is pushing to turn hundreds of thousands of Teslas into fully driverless vehicles and has started selling two-seated Cybercabs without steering wheels or pedals, while analysts expect a sixth consecutive quarter of flat or falling profits when Tesla reports second-quarter earnings next week. The stock trades at 170 times expected earnings, more than eight times the S&P 500 average.