The driver of a Tesla Model 3 that crashed into a Katy, Texas home in June, killing a 76-year-old resident, "manually overrode" Full Self-Driving (FSD) by pressing the accelerator pedal to 100 percent, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) confirmed in a preliminary report on Wednesday1,2.
Electronic data recovered from the vehicle showed the Tesla Model 3 was traveling more than 70 miles per hour when it struck the home on Rose Hollow Lane, a residential two-lane road with a posted speed limit of 30 mph. The crash killed Martha Avila, 76, who was inside the home. The driver, 44-year-old Michael Butler, has been charged with manslaughter.
The NTSB said Butler was using Full Self-Driving (Supervised) on the residential road prior to the crash. Security camera footage obtained by the safety board showed the car accelerating through an intersection, leaving the road, and hitting the home.
The data aligns with Tesla's own account of the incident, which the company shared publicly in the days following the crash to argue that its advanced driver-assistance system was not at fault. Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote on X shortly after the crash: "[T]his [allegation] makes no sense. FSD drives slowly through neighborhood streets and this was a high speed crash!".
The family of Martha Avila has since sued both Butler and Tesla, claiming negligence. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is also investigating the incident separately from the NTSB probe.
The NTSB's findings arrive as Tesla expands its autonomous driving ambitions. Tesla announced on July 11, 2026, that fully autonomous Cybercab rides for employees would begin at Gigafactory Texas, marking the first operational deployment of the steering-wheel-less vehicle on company grounds ctx. Separately, robotaxi operators in Texas — though not Tesla specifically — reported 21 new crashes to federal regulators in the latest monthly data release ctx.
ANALYSIS The NTSB's preliminary findings narrow the causal picture for this specific crash: the driver's manual override of FSD, not a system malfunction, produced the fatal acceleration. That distinction matters for Tesla's legal exposure in the Avila family's negligence suit, though the broader question of how FSD's design handles driver overrides — and whether the system should resist or alert during extreme pedal inputs on low-speed residential roads — remains open as the investigation continues.