The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a special investigation on Monday into a Tesla Model 3 crash near Houston after the car tore into a Texas home at high speed and killed Martha Avila. The probe puts fresh federal scrutiny on Tesla’s automated driving technology just days after the wreck.
For readers searching now, the reason is the timing. The crash happened Friday, and the driver told the Harris County Sheriff’s Office that he was using the technology. Martha Avila, 76, was standing inside the home when the car struck it, and the police report said the driver was not drunk and is cooperating.
Video obtained by KHOU-TV showed the Model 3 traveling at top speed over the front lawn of a brick home in Katy before ramming into a front room. The next shot showed the car encased in the house amid piles of crumbling plaster, split beams and bits of furniture. That damage turned a single crash into a federal case, because investigators are now weighing whether the technology was involved at all, or whether the driver’s claim will prove to be beside the point.
Tesla did not respond immediately to a request for comment. The company has been the subject of several National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigations, including one late last year into 58 incidents in which Teslas reportedly violated traffic safety laws while using self-driving technology, and another a few months earlier over delayed crash reporting. Over the past decade, the agency has opened 46 special crash investigations involving Teslas using self-driving or driver-assistance technology, and in more than a dozen of those crashes at least one person was killed.
Elon Musk has said automated driving technology is central to Tesla’s future, and he is rolling out robotaxis using automated software in several U.S. cities this year while planning to invite owners to put their cars into the fleet nationwide. For now, the federal question is narrower and more urgent: what the car was doing in the seconds before it hit Martha Avila’s home, and whether that technology failed, was misused or played no role at all.
