On 6 July 2025, at about 6:57 p.m., a 2019 Tesla Model 3 went through a stop sign at County Route 671 and Chestnut Avenue in Buena Vista Township, Atlantic County, New Jersey, and struck a Honda Civic turning left across the intersection. The Civic's driver, 82-year-old Stephen Field, was killed. The Tesla's driver and three passengers were moderately injured.
The local report recorded it as a car that failed to stop. What that report does not say — and what Tesla's own submission to the US regulator does — is that a Level 2 driver-assistance system was running at the time.
What Tesla told NHTSA
Under NHTSA's Standing General Order, carmakers must report crashes involving advanced driver assistance. In the entry matching this crash, Tesla recorded the automation status as "Verified Engaged" — meaning the company's own telemetry confirms the system was active, not that a driver later claimed it was.
What the entry discloses is thin, and three further fields are withheld as confidential business information:
| Field | What Tesla filed |
|---|---|
| Automation status | Verified Engaged |
| Pre-crash speed | 4 mph |
| Crash narrative | Withheld as confidential |
| Software version | Withheld as confidential |
| Operating-area approval | Withheld as confidential |
The redactions are the reason this is journalism rather than a database lookup. Electrek matched the record to the crash on location, state, vehicle type, fatality confirmation and timestamp — the filing's 22:54 UTC is 6:54 p.m. local, within three minutes of the time in the police report.
The 4 mph detail
The logged pre-crash speed is the part worth sitting with. Four miles an hour is not a car that blew through an intersection; it is a car that slowed, did not stop, and continued. That is a rolling stop.
Tesla recalled roughly 54,000 vehicles in 2022 over exactly that behaviour, after a "rolling stop" setting let cars proceed through all-way stops at low speed without coming to a halt. Electrek's reading is that this crash most likely involved FSD rather than basic Autopilot, on the grounds that stop-sign recognition is a City Streets capability — basic Autopilot is a highway lane-keeping system and does not handle intersections at all. Tesla's redaction of the software version is what keeps that an inference rather than a fact.
The pattern this belongs to
This is the latest crash Electrek has matched in an ongoing investigation into the gap between what police reports say and what Tesla's filings record. TeslAnt has covered several of the others: a Model X on driver assist at 49 mph that killed a motorcyclist in Moraine, Ohio, a fatal left turn at 24 mph in Batavia, and two Teslas that sat stopped in live freeway lanes.
The common thread is not that driver assistance caused these crashes. It is that the public record — the one a coroner, a local paper or a bereaved family reads — does not contain the fact that it was switched on, and Tesla's filing does.
Why it matters in Europe
European FSD (Supervised) has no equivalent of the Standing General Order behind it. There is no public database of crashes with the automation status attached, verified by the manufacturer, that anyone can go and match. As more European markets clear the system, that absence is worth naming: the only reason this New Jersey crash is knowable at all is a US reporting rule.