• 2 min read
NTSB says Texas Tesla was at full throttle in fatal crash
Federal investigators say a Tesla in a fatal Katy, Texas crash was in FSD Supervised when the driver pressed the accelerator to 100% before impact.
Image: Gizmodo
Federal investigators have now backed Tesla’s account of a fatal Katy, Texas crash: the Tesla was in FSD (Supervised), and the driver had the accelerator pressed to 100% before impact.
The National Transportation Safety Board said in a report released Wednesday that electronic data from the vehicle showed the driver manually overrode the system by flooring the pedal, and that the car was traveling at more than 70 mph when it crashed into a home and killed a 76-year-old woman late last month. The driver has been charged with manslaughter.
According to the source article, the victim’s family has sued both Tesla and the driver. Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s head of AI, had already said after the crash that the driver “manually overrode self-driving by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100% of the accel pedal in this residential area.” Elon Musk also pushed back on coverage of the crash, writing, “Yes, this makes no sense. FSD drives slowly through neighborhood streets and this was a high speed crash!”
That does not settle the central dispute. As the source notes, pressing the accelerator does not necessarily disengage FSD, much like traditional cruise control systems can accept driver input without switching off. In that sense, the vehicle could still have been operating in FSD mode even if the driver was actively overriding it.
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Court documents cited by ABC News say the driver claimed he “passed out” with the car in FSD on the highway and remembers nothing else before the crash. The same documents reportedly show no seizures, cardiac episodes, drugs, or alcohol in his medical records. A local Fox affiliate reported that the car was making DoorDash deliveries in the “hours and minutes leading up to the crash.”
The source also says court records reviewed by Electrek show the driver had searched for phrases including:
- “Tesla fsd not aggressive enough 2026”
- “FSD is not aggressive enough for city driving”
- “Tesla fsd too timid”
The lawsuit is likely to reveal more about how FSD behaved in the moments before the collision, and whether Tesla’s driver-assistance system remains a meaningful part of the case even with the pedal pinned to the floor.
Frontier Editor
Dan is our resident futurist, covering electric mobility, space exploration, and the smart home. He's interested in atoms just as much as bits. Whether it's a new battery chemistry, a reusable rocket, or a protocol that finally makes IoT devices talk to each other, Dan breaks down the engineering that pushes humanity forward.
via Gizmodo
