In an incident that was horrible beyond words, end of last monthA stunned family watched in horror as a car crashed into the home of a 76-year-old mother and grandmother in Katy, Texas, killing her. The driver has been accused of involuntary manslaughter.
Following the accident, it was learned that the car in question was a Tesla and that the driver was using full self-driving (FSD) mode at the time the accident occurred. The victim’s family has named Tesla and driver as defendants in lawsuit. But by ElectrekTesla was able to view the crash data very quickly after the incident, and the company’s AI chief Ashok Elluswamy said the driver “manually overridden autonomous driving by pressing the accelerator to 100% accelerator pedal in this residential area.”
In the days after the accident, Tesla fans took issue with coverage that characterized the car as being at FSD when the accident occurred.. CEO Elon Musk seemed to agree: responding to one post, “Yeah, this doesn’t make sense. FSD drives slowly down the neighborhood streets and this was a high speed accident!”
But Musk seems to be assuming bad faith, as if the coverage implied that FSD had suddenly switched into, perhaps, some sort of previously unannounced homicidal manic mode and attacked a house. If someone said this is what happened, they should apologize. That’s clearly not what happened.
And on Wednesday, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) largely confirmed Tesla’s version of events. Their report says, in part:
“Electronic data recovered from the vehicle indicated that prior to the accident, the driver manually overridden the FSD (supervised) by pressing the accelerator pedal to 100%, and the vehicle speed was greater than 70 mph when the accident occurred.”
But cooler minds had noted weeks earlier that, just as with the old cruise control, accelerating it doesn’t boot from FSD. The car takes the entry and remains in FSD. The question is not one of mechanics and technology, but one of philosophy: if the FSD is intended to “drive” when someone steps on the accelerator in a residential area, the FSD may not be the “driver” in any important sense, but the car was still in FSD mode.
Because as much as Tesla would probably like the FSD to not be a total factor in the incident, that can’t be the case either.
ABC News He noted that, according to court documents, the driver claimed he “blacked out” with the car at FSD on the highway, and that is the last thing he remembers before the accident. He says he was not sick and medical records show no seizures, cardiac events, drugs or alcohol.
TO local Fox affiliate says records show the car was making deliveries for DoorDash while at FSD in the “hours and minutes before the accident.” While in a neighborhood, he apparently indicated that he was going to turn left onto a street, but instead put the pedal to the metal. This led the Tesla into the victim’s dead end and put it on its fateful collision course with his home.
To make things even stranger, they now show other court records: by Electrekthat the driver had Googled the terms “Tesla fsd not aggressive enough for 2026”, “FSD not aggressive enough for city driving” and “Tesla fsd too timid”. That’s the kind of thing you Google when you search for a Reddit post from someone sharing your consumer complaint.
In any case, there’s not much chance that the driver wanted this to happen, nor that Tesla programmed its cars with bad intentions. But the FSD was being used at the time of this unusual fatal incident and the public deserves to know more. Fortunately, much more will come out as the lawsuit progresses.
