Musk on fatal Tesla crash in Texas: ‘This makes no sense’

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is pushing back on allegations the company’s full self-driving software was involved in a recent crash that killed a Texas woman. Martha Avila, 76, died after a Tesla drove through the front of her home in Katy, Texas, last Friday. Both police and the driver have indicated that Tesla’s automated driving assistance system was in use at the time of the accident, according to a lawsuit filed by Avila’s daughter. “[T]his makes no sense,” Musk wrote in an X post Monday. “FSD [full self-driving] drives slowly through neighborhood streets and this was a high speed crash!” Tesla’s vice president of AI software, Ashok Elluswamy, similarly argued that the driver “manually overrode self-driving by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100% of the accel pedal in this residential area.” Jennifer Barbour, Avila’s daughter, and her husband Justin Barbour are suing both Tesla and the driver, Michael Butler, over the crash. The lawsuit alleges the accident was “caused by the concurrent negligence of Defendant Butler and the defective condition of the Vehicle and its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems as designed, manufactured, and marketed by Defendant Tesla.” The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said it has launched a special crash investigation into the incident. The federal regulator previously opened a probe into Tesla’s full-self driving software, which escalated in March from a preliminary evaluation to an engineering analysis. It is investigating nine other crashes, including one fatal, in which the system failed to detect poor driving conditions and alert drivers quickly enough.