The National Transportation Safety Board (NTB) has released preliminary findings confirming that a Tesla driver involved in a fatal Texas crash manually overrode the vehicle's Full Self-Driving (FSD) system by pressing the accelerator pedal to 100 percent in the moments before impact.
The crash, which killed a grandmother, became the subject of public dispute after the driver claimed Tesla's autopilot was engaged at the time of the collision. The NTSB's preliminary report, published on Wednesday, does not yet determine the cause of the crash but provides key electronic data about the vehicle's operation leading up to the incident.
Driver's Claims and Tesla's Response
Last month, 44-year-old Michael Butler told police that the autopilot feature was engaged when the crash occurred. His account prompted a swift response from Elon Musk on the social media platform X, where the Tesla CEO disputed the claim.
Musk wrote that Butler must have overridden the feature, reasoning that FSD drives slowly through neighborhood streets and that the incident was a high-speed crash. Tesla's vice president of AI software, Ashok Elluswamy, backed Musk's assertion, stating that internal data showed the driver had manually overridden self-driving by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100 percent in a residential area.