A 64-year-old woman from Raymore, Missouri died when her Model Y left Interstate 35 and hit a guardrail. The Missouri State Highway Patrol recorded a single-vehicle crash in which the car "went off the road". Tesla's own filing to federal regulators says a driver-assistance system was engaged at the time. The two records were never connected in public until now.
What each record says
The crash happened on 14 April 2025 at about 3 p.m., at mile marker 68 on I-35 in Daviess County, near Pattonsburg. The car was a 2024 Model Y. It departed the west side of the roadway, struck a guardrail, and the driver — who was wearing a seatbelt — was pronounced dead at the scene.
| Highway Patrol record | Tesla's NHTSA filing | |
|---|---|---|
| Event | Single-vehicle, left roadway | Fixed-object collision |
| Driver assistance | Not mentioned | Engaged |
| Speed | Not given | 73 mph in a 70 mph zone |
| Outcome | Fatality | Fatality |
| Data held | — | Event data recorder and telematics |
Neither record is wrong. The troopers described what they could see, and they had no reason to know what software was running. Tesla knew, because the car told it.
What Tesla withheld
Under NHTSA's Standing General Order, manufacturers must report crashes involving driver assistance. Tesla filed this one — and redacted the crash narrative, the operating-domain flag, and the system, hardware and software versions as confidential business information.
That matters for what can honestly be said here. The redacted version fields mean it is not established publicly whether the car was running Autopilot or Full Self-Driving (Supervised), and the missing narrative means there is no account of what the system did in the seconds before the guardrail. This April 2025 report also predates the "Verified Engaged" confirmation flag Tesla later began applying — the flag that made the Vinemont, Alabama departure a firmer record than this one. The claim supported here is narrower: a driver-assistance system was on.
The match itself comes from Electrek's continuing work against the redacted federal dataset, aligning unredacted fields — state, location, vehicle, month, fatality status, investigating agency, and a 20:03 UTC timestamp that converts to about 3 p.m. local — with public reporting.
The pattern, and its limits
This is the latest in a run of such reconstructions TeslAnt has covered since late August: Vinemont, Buena Vista, Moraine and two stopped-on-the-freeway Model 3 crashes. The recurring feature is not a particular failure mode — a guardrail departure, a stop sign and a motorcyclist have little in common mechanically. It is that local reporting consistently omits driver assistance because local investigators consistently do not have it.
What it means for European owners
The direct regulatory relevance here is limited: UNECE rules govern what can be enabled here, and FSD (Supervised) is not generally available. The transferable point is about evidence. A road-safety statistic assembled from police reports will undercount driver-assistance involvement by construction, in any country, because the police report is written by someone who cannot see the log.