On 15 July 2026, the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released preliminary findings on a fatal crash in Katy, Texas, and the data points squarely at the driver rather than Tesla's Full Self-Driving system. According to the report, the driver of a 2025 Model 3 manually overrode FSD by pressing the accelerator pedal to 100%, reaching more than 70 mph on a 30 mph residential road before leaving the roadway and striking a house. A 76-year-old resident, Martha Avila, was killed.
How FSD behaved
The significance of the NTSB's account is what pressing the accelerator does to the software. Full Self-Driving (Supervised), like Autopilot before it, hands longitudinal control back to the driver the instant the accelerator is depressed — the system will not brake against a pedal the driver is actively holding down. Security-camera footage obtained by investigators showed the car accelerating through an intersection before departing the road, a pattern consistent with a full-throttle override rather than an autonomous-system failure.
The manslaughter charge
Police reported that the driver's phone contained Google searches including "Tesla FSD not aggressive enough 2026" and "Tesla FSD too timid," raising questions about how he had been operating the vehicle in the period before the crash. The driver, Michael Butler, has since been charged with manslaughter. The victim's family has filed a lawsuit naming both the driver and Tesla, alleging negligence.
Why it matters
The preliminary findings broadly support Tesla's public account of the crash — that the vehicle was under manual throttle input, not autonomous control, at the moment it left the road. That distinction matters. It arrives as NHTSA separately investigates roughly 3.2 million FSD-equipped Teslas over how the camera-only system performs in degraded-visibility conditions such as glare and airborne obscurants. This NTSB case is a different animal: a driver override, not a self-driving fault. Conflating the two would misread what the evidence shows.
The findings are preliminary. A final report with a probable-cause determination will follow later in the investigation, and it could add nuance — but the core physical evidence, a fully depressed accelerator and camera footage of sustained acceleration, is unlikely to change.
For European owners
FSD (Supervised) is only now expanding across Europe, and the same override logic applies wherever it ships: the accelerator always takes priority over the automated speed and path control. European regulators weighing FSD approval under UNECE frameworks will be watching how US investigations separate driver misuse from genuine system fault — because that line is exactly what type-approval bodies must draw before allowing broader deployment. For owners, the practical takeaway is unchanged: FSD (Supervised) is a driver-assistance system that expects an attentive human, and flooring the accelerator disengages its speed control entirely.