A fatal crash in which a Tesla plowed into a brick home in Katy, Texas, killing a 76-year-old woman, has raised alarm about the company’s driver-assistance technology. By Monday afternoon, Tesla was addressing the issue.
The crash occurred Friday night when a Tesla Model 3 driven by Michael Butler left the road and it hit home of Martha Avila, who was airlifted to a hospital and later pronounced dead. Butler told Harris County Sheriff’s deputies the vehicle was on autopilot at the time. That detail spread quickly, and by the weekend the story had become the focus of a long-running debate about Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (Supervised) driver assistance systems.
But Tesla, a company that shed its public relations department years ago, broke its usual silence Monday to push back.
Ashok Elluswamy, vice president of AI software at Tesla and the first engineer hired for the Autopilot team in 2014, went to X to offer a very different account of what the data showed. “In this case, the driver manually engaged the self-driving car by pressing the gas pedal up to 100% of the gas pedal in this residential area,” he wrote. “They reached a speed of 73 mph during the crash and had the accelerator depressed even after the crash.”
The bottom line was that whatever system was activated, a human foot on the pedal at full throttle was responsible for what followed, not the car.
Elon Musk reinforced Elluswamy’s view to his own X account immediately afterwards. “This [allegation] it doesn’t make sense. FSD moves slowly on neighborhood streets and this was a high speed crash!” he wrote
Tesla discontinued Autopilot, its main driver assistance system, in January after a California ruling that the name was misleading to consumers. Full Self-Driving (Supervised), which requires a $99 monthly subscription, handles driver maneuvers including route navigation, steering, lane changes and parking, but still requires the driver to actively supervise the system at all times.
Either way, federal regulators seem determined to reach their own conclusions. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration confirmed to TechCrunch on Monday that it has opened a special investigation into the crash. The research is said to be the latest more than 40 such detectors the service has been launched in Tesla accidents believed to involve advanced driver assistance systems in recent years.
The Harris County Sheriff’s Office said it will present its findings to the local district attorney to determine if criminal charges are warranted.
Whether the Autopilot system was actually active, overridden or malfunctioning likely won’t be resolved until investigators finish reviewing the vehicle’s data logs.
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