The Chonkerton

Tesla driver who blamed crash on autopilot pressed accelerator 100%, NTSB finds

tech

The National Transportation Safety Board has confirmed a claim made by Elon Musk and Tesla about a fatal Texas crash that killed a grandmother. According to Ars Technica, the driver, forty-four-year-old Michael Butler, told police that Tesla's autopilot was engaged at the time. But in preliminary findings released on Wednesday, the safety board reported that while Full Self-Driving was active, electronic data showed the driver manually overrode it by pressing the accelerator pedal all the way to one hundred percent. Tesla and Musk had publicly disputed Butler's account, with the company's vice president of AI software pointing to internal data showing the same override. The report does not yet determine what caused the crash.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/tesla-driver-...

Listen to this story

Hear this and more stories in a personalized audio briefing.

Open The Chonkerton