Federal safety regulators have opened an investigation into Tesla’s driver assistance systems following a fatal crash in Texas where a Model 3 veered off-road and slammed into a home. The 76-year-old woman inside the home was killed.
Tesla chief executive and newly minted trillionaire Elon Musk protested the investigation on his social media platform X, saying the incident “makes no sense.”
“FSD drives slowly through neighborhood streets and this was a high speed crash!” Musk wrote, referring to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) system.
The driver, Michael Butler, told investigators at the scene in Katy, Texas, outside Houston, that he had been using Tesla’s partially automated driving system, officials said. The Houston Chronicle reported that Martha Avila, 76, was flown to Memorial Hermann medical center June 19 after the Tesla crashed into her front room, but she was pronounced dead at the hospital.
Houston law firm Zehl & Associates announced plans to sue Tesla and the driver on behalf of Avila's family.
However, Tesla's vice president of autopilot Ashok Elluswamy also fired back, writing on X, "In this case, the driver manually overrode self-driving by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100% of the accel pedal in this residential area. They reached a speed of 73 mph during the crash, and had the accelerator pressed even after the crash."
Riza Ingalls peppered him with questions on X, asking, "was the driver impaired, were they unconscious, or did they intentionally accelerate? The cabin camera should show the state of the driver. what are the facts?" Elluswamy did not respond.
CNBC reported the NHTSA, aka the federal vehicle safety regulator, has "opened more than three dozen Tesla special crash investigations involving the company’s “advanced driver assistance systems,” or partially automated driving systems, since 2016, when these became a part of the EV maker’s new vehicles."
That comes amidst more controversy, as Senators Edwards Markey and Richard Blumenthal urged the NHTSA in a letter to investigate “misleading and incomplete safety statistics” used by Tesla to promote the self-driving technology. Specifically, news outlet Reuters examined Tesla's data last month and reported that Tesla's claims that auto pilot is up to 10 times safer than human drivers could be misleading.
"Researchers interviewed by Reuters said Tesla exaggerates the technology’s safety by comparing a rate of crashes in FSD-piloted Teslas that triggered airbag deployments to a U.S. crash rate for all vehicles that includes far less severe accidents," the report said, adding, "The company also compares its cars to the average U.S. vehicle, which is much older than the average Tesla. That distorts the results because automakers have gradually introduced new safety features that reduce crashes."
The Democratic senators piled on after that report, telling the NHTSA that "Misleading safety statistics can encourage drivers to over-rely on (Full Self Driving), obscure whether the technology is creating safety defects, and undermine (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's) ability to evaluate risks associated with vehicles already operating on public roads."
