Federal investigators are now looking into a deadly Houston-area crash in which a Tesla went airborne before slamming into a family home, drawing fresh national attention to a tragedy that has turned into a dispute over who, or what, was in control of the car at the moment of impact.
The crash happened Friday on Blooming Park Lane in Cinco Ranch, not far from Westheimer and South Fry. The Tesla tore into the family playroom of the house. Three children were inside the home at the time, but they were not in that room. A grandmother, Martha Avila, was, and she was killed.
For the family, the loss is devastating. The father recounted running outside after the impact to find a crowd staring at his house and a car inside it. After making sure all the children were safe and moving them to a secure area, the family began searching for Avila, who the father said had helped raise the children, before finding her.
At the center of the case is a sharp disagreement over the cause. The driver claims the car was operating on autopilot when it careened into the home, a claim that, if true, would put the spotlight squarely on Tesla's driver-assistance technology and its behaviour in a residential setting.
Tesla, however, is publicly pushing back. The company's head of AI is disputing the autopilot account, writing in a reply to Elon Musk on X that the driver manually overrode the self-driving system by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100 percent in a residential area, shifting responsibility onto the person behind the wheel.
New video has added to the scrutiny by showing just how fast the car was travelling. The footage points to a speed of about 73 miles per hour during the crash, and indications that the accelerator remained pressed even after the vehicle had hit the house, details that investigators will now have to weigh.
With federal authorities involved, the case has grown beyond a single neighbourhood tragedy into a wider question about self-driving features, driver behaviour and accountability. The investigation is expected to focus on reconstructing exactly what happened in the seconds before the Tesla left the road and entered the home.