The top federal auto safety agency said Monday it was investigating a Tesla crash that killed a woman in Katy, Texas, near Houston, on Friday night.
The driver was using Tesla’s automated driver assistance system when his Model 3 left the road “at a high rate of speed” and crashed into a house, local officials said. A woman in the home, Martha Avila, 76, was taken by medical helicopter to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead, the Harris County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement Saturday. The driver showed no signs of intoxication, the office said.
A spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the division of the Department of Transportation that opened the federal investigation, said he could not provide details. According to the agency’s website, these “special accident investigations” are intended to examine accidents that occur under unusual circumstances.
As of Monday afternoon, no charges had been filed against the driver, the Sheriff’s Office said. “Once all evidence has been gathered, it will be presented to the Harris County District Attorney’s Office to determine if charges are appropriate,” a representative for the office said in an email.
Avila’s daughter, Jennifer Barbour, told KHOU, a Houston television station, that she didn’t know who to blame. “I don’t know if it’s his fault or the car’s fault or what really happened,” he said, adding, “I’ve never seen a car go that fast.”
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The company’s driver assistance systems (autopilot and full self-driving) have been involved in several accidents, some of them fatal.
In 2023, Tesla recalled more than two million vehicles after federal regulators said the company had not done enough to ensure drivers remained attentive when using Autopilot, a system that can steer, accelerate and brake cars automatically.
Tesla owners’ manuals tell drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and take control if something goes wrong while using Autopilot or full self-driving. But lawsuits and police reports have documented cases in which drivers became distracted and did not intervene before an accident.
In 2024, Tesla settled a lawsuit that blamed the automaker’s driver-assistance software for the death of a California man in 2018. The man, Wei Lun Huang, died after his Tesla Model Mr. Huang’s family filed a lawsuit that blamed defects in the autopilot for the accident.
