Federal probe suggests Tesla’s self-driving mode did not cause deadly crash in Katy

NOTE: The above video is from the June 23 edition of the Htown Morning News. HOUSTON (CW39) — Federal safety investigators looking into a runaway Tesla that killed a grandmother in her home in Katy last month said the driver had pressed the accelerator to full speed, suggesting the vehicle's self-driving software was not to blame. The driver had told Harris County deputies that he had the self-driving software turned on, but a report from the National Transportation Safety Board on Wednesday concluded that he had actually overridden that feature when he pushed hard on the pedal. Moments later the Tesla Model 3 raced down a residential street in the Memorial Parkway area of Katy, at highway speeds, slammed into a brick home and killed a 76-year-old woman standing in the front room. The Tesla driver, Michael Butler, was arrested by the Harris County Sheriff’s Office earlier this month and charged with manslaughter in the death of Martha Avila. Avila's daughter, Jennifer Barbour, and her husband, Justin Barbour, have filed a lawsuit against Butler and Tesla due to the crash. Video of the accident shows the Tesla traveling at more than 70 miles per hour, jumping a curb then tearing across a lawn before crushing through a brick wall of a home. Avila, who was standing feet away, was found amid piles of crumbling plaster, split beams and bits of furniture and rushed to a hospital but died. The crash last month drew national attention because Tesla CEO Elon Musk is seeking to reassure the public its self-driving feature is safe as he prepares to turn hundreds of thousands of Teslas already on the road into fully automatic vehicles and begin selling two-seated Cybercabs missing steering wheels and pedals. The crash came two months after officials at a separate federal agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, announced it was elevating a 2024 investigation of the self-driving feature to new “engineering analysis” level, raising the possibility of a recall of 3.2 million Tesla vehicles. That NHTSA probe was triggered by crashes where the self-driving feature failed to alert drivers to take control in fog and other poor visibility conditions. The agency opened an investigation last year into 58 incidents in which Teslas reportedly violated traffic safety laws while using self-driving technology, leading to more than a dozen crashes and fires and nearly two dozen injuries. Separate from the National Transportation Safety Board, NHTSA is also looking into the Tesla house crash in Texas, one of 46 “special crash” investigations of Tesla's self-driving or driver-assistance technology in the past decade, according to the agency’s records. In more than a dozen of those crashes, at least one person — a driver, passenger or pedestrian — was killed. Tesla had originally called its driver assistance software Full Self-Driving, or FSD, but auto experts and regulators complained it was misleading because drivers must always keep their eyes on the road and be ready to take over at any time. The company has since changed the name to Full Self-Driving (Supervised). The Associated Press contributed to this report.