Federal safety investigators have now released a preliminary report into a deadly Houston-area crash in which a Tesla went airborne before slamming into a family home, offering an official account of a tragedy that had 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 had been a sharp disagreement over the cause. The driver claimed the car was operating on autopilot when it careened into the home, a claim that, if true, would have put the spotlight squarely on Tesla's driver-assistance technology and its behaviour in a residential setting.
The preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board now cuts against that account. According to the NTSB, data recovered from the car shows that the driver manually overrode the full self-driving feature and stepped on the accelerator, pushing it all the way to 100 percent, shifting the focus onto the person behind the wheel rather than the vehicle's software.
The federal findings also underscore how fast the Tesla was moving. The report says the car was traveling more than 70 miles per hour when it crashed into the home, a figure consistent with earlier video that had pointed to a speed of roughly 73 miles per hour and indications that the accelerator remained pressed even after the vehicle had struck the house.
Even before the report, the case had already moved into the courts. The driver, 44-year-old Michael Butler, is charged with manslaughter in connection with the crash, and prosecutors are pursuing the case as investigators continue to reconstruct exactly what happened in the seconds before the car left the road and entered the home.
With the NTSB's preliminary conclusions now public, the case has grown beyond a single neighbourhood tragedy into a wider question about self-driving features, driver behaviour and accountability. The board's investigation is continuing, and a fuller report is expected to follow as authorities complete their review of the deadly crash.