The NTSB's preliminary report on the Katy, Texas crash confirms that the driver of a Tesla Model 3 manually turned off the car's Full Self-Driving feature by pressing the gas pedal all the way down before the vehicle struck a home at speeds above 70 mph, killing 76-year-old Martha Avila. (The Verge)

The crash happened in June on a two-lane road in Katy, Texas, where the speed limit is 30 mph. The weather was clear, the road was dry, and it was daylight. Michael Butler, 44, was driving the Model 3 when it left the road and hit the house. Avila was inside the home and was killed. (The Verge)

Tesla's Full Self-Driving, or FSD, is a feature that can steer, brake, and accelerate the car on its own in many situations. But the system is designed so that if the driver presses the gas pedal, the car hands control back to the driver. According to the NTSB report, data from the car shows Butler pressed the accelerator fully, which turned off FSD. Tesla AI head Ashok Elluswamy said separately that the driver manually overrode self-driving by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100 percent. (The Verge)

Butler was arrested and is facing manslaughter charges. He told hospital staff after the crash that he remembered putting the car in self-driving mode and that he passed out. (The Verge)

Data recovered from Butler's phone included Google searches about FSD, among them "Tesla fsd not aggressive enough 2026 model" and "tesla fsd too timid." (The Verge)

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is also investigating the crash. (The Verge)

The NTSB's findings place the immediate cause of the crash on the driver's decision to take over from the self-driving system, not on a failure of FSD itself. Because pressing the gas pedal is what turned off Full Self-Driving, the car was under manual control when it went over 70 mph in a 30 mph zone. That matters for the investigations and for the manslaughter case against Butler, because it points to the driver's actions, not the software, as the cause.

There is a broader and more uncomfortable question raised by the phone search history. The searches "Tesla fsd not aggressive enough 2026 model" and "tesla fsd too timid" suggest a driver who was frustrated by the system's cautious driving style. Someone in that frame of mind may have overridden FSD precisely because he found it too careful. If a driver's response to a safety system is to switch it off because it is not aggressive enough, the technology is working as designed while the way the person uses it is producing the opposite of what was intended.

Butler's statement that he passed out after turning on FSD raises another problem. Tesla cars have a driver monitoring system meant to detect when a driver is not paying attention and warn them, eventually turning off self-driving. But a driver who is unconscious and also pressing the gas pedal fully creates a situation the system was not built to handle. The gas pedal override is a feature, not a malfunction. Tesla has always allowed drivers to take back control by pressing the pedal, assuming the driver wants to drive. Whether that assumption makes sense when the driver may have passed out is a question the NTSB report and Elluswamy's statement do not address.

For the people building driver-assistance systems, the Katy crash is a case study in the gap between how a system is designed and how people actually use it. The FSD system appears to have been working correctly and driving cautiously, as it was built to do. The driver overrode it. The car then went more than twice the speed limit into a home. A 76-year-old woman inside that home is dead. The technology did not fail in any way investigators can detect. The interaction between the technology and its user did.

The NTSB's report is preliminary, and both the NTSB and NHTSA investigations are still ongoing. The manslaughter case will likely depend on whether a jury sees Butler's decision to override the system and his loss of consciousness as criminal negligence. The regulatory investigations may depend on whether letting drivers switch off self-driving by pressing the gas pedal, given the limits of driver monitoring, is safe enough for systems operating on public roads in residential areas at 70 mph.