{"id":3596,"date":"2026-07-17T05:40:07","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T05:40:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=3596"},"modified":"2026-07-17T05:40:07","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T05:40:07","slug":"runaway-tesla-that-crashed-into-a-grandmothers-living-room-was-actually-being-steered-by-a-human-investigators-find","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=3596","title":{"rendered":"Runaway Tesla that crashed into a grandmother\u2019s living room was actually being steered by a human, investigators find"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The driver had told police that he had the self-driving software turned on, but a report from the National Transportation Safety Board on Wednesday concluded that he had actually overridden that feature when he pushed hard on the pedal. Moments later the Tesla Model 3 raced down a residential street in Katy, Texas, at highway speeds, slammed into a brick home and killed a 76-year-old woman standing in the front room.<\/p>\n

Read more Over 120 million car trips, study finds speeding only saved drivers 54 seconds on average<\/a><\/p>\n

The crash last month drew national attention because Tesla CEO Elon Musk is seeking to reassure the public its self-driving feature is safe as he prepares to turn hundreds of thousands of Teslas already on the road into fully automatic vehicles and begin selling\u00a0two-seated Cybercabs\u00a0missing steering wheels and pedals.<\/p>\n

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The crash came two months after officials at a separate federal agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, announced it was\u00a0elevating a 2024 investigation\u00a0of the self-driving feature to new \u201cengineering analysis\u201d level, raising the possibility of a recall of 3.2 million Tesla vehicles.<\/p>\n

That NHTSA probe was triggered by crashes where the self-driving feature failed to alert drivers to take control in fog and other poor visibility conditions.<\/p>\n

The agency opened an\u00a0investigation last year into 58 incidents\u00a0in which Teslas reportedly violated traffic safety laws while using self-driving technology, leading to more than a dozen crashes and fires and nearly two dozen injuries.<\/p>\n

Separate from the National Transportation Safety Board, NHTSA is also looking into the Tesla house crash in Texas, one of 46 \u201cspecial crash\u201d investigations of Tesla\u2019s self-driving or driver-assistance technology in the past decade, according to the agency\u2019s records. In more than a dozen of those crashes, at least one person \u2014 a driver, passenger or pedestrian \u2014 was killed.<\/p>\n

Read more Buffett says AI giants are \u2018playing a game they don\u2019t want to play\u2019 in the AI race, reveals he was behind Berkshire\u2019s $31 billion bet on Google<\/a><\/p>\n

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Tesla had originally called its driver assistance software Full Self-Driving, or FSD, but auto experts and regulators complained it was misleading because drivers must always keep their eyes on the road and be ready to take over at any time.<\/p>\n

The company has since\u00a0changed the name\u00a0to Full Self-Driving (Supervised).<\/p>\n

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Video of the Katy, Texas, accident shows the Tesla traveling at more than 70 mph (112.65 kilometers per hour), jumping a curb then tearing across a lawn before crushing through a brick wall of a home. A woman standing feet away, Martha Avila, was found amid piles of crumbling plaster, split beams and bits of furniture and rushed to a hospital but died.<\/p>\n

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Sales of Tesla cars\u00a0still haven\u2019t recovered fully\u00a0from boycotts last year over Musk\u2019s\u00a0far-right political stands, but the stock is rising anyway as he has successfully shifted attention away from the sales figures. He says they matter less now that the company is on the cusp of major technological advances, such as turning Teslas into hands-free vehicles and having its Optimus robots take over for humans for tasks at home and work.<\/p>\n

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Tesla stock has risen 22% in the past year and is currently trading at 170 times expected annual earnings compared to 20 for the S&P 500.<\/p>\n

For its second-quarter financial results out next week, financial analysts surveyed by FactSet expect earnings per share will barely budge \u2014 32 cents versus 33 cents a year earlier \u2014 continuing a sixth quarter streak of flat or falling profits.<\/p>\n

Read more Moonshot\u2019s Kimi K3 pushes Chinese AI into Fable-level territory<\/a><\/p>\n

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Federal investigators say a Model 3 in Katy, Texas was on Full Self-Driving (Supervised) when the driver slammed the accelerator to 100%.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3595,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[330],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tesla"],"yoast_head":"\nRunaway Tesla that crashed into a grandmother\u2019s living room was actually being steered by a human, investigators find - Cross Country Moving Team<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=3596\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Runaway Tesla that crashed into a grandmother\u2019s living room was actually being steered by a human, investigators find - 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