On Friday, June 19, 2026, a Tesla Model Y driven by Michael Butler left the road and crashed into a home in Katy, Texas. A 76-year-old woman in the living room was struck by the car. She was airlifted to a hospital and was later pronounced dead. Butler told police his car was in Autopilot mode at the time of the incident. As of this moment, no charges have been brought against the driver, who was sober and cooperative with authorities after the crash. The Harris County Sheriff’s office said in a statement that the Tesla Model Y was being driven “with an automated driving assistance system” when the incident occurred. Butler allegedly failed to drive in a single lane, left the roadway, and struck the residence, according to the sheriff’s office. “Butler’s Tesla entered through the brick residence, at a high rate of speed, and struck M. Avila who was inside the residence,” the sheriff’s office said. Defining Terms Details of the incident are sketchy at the moment. We do not know whether the Model Y was operating on Autopilot or was in Full Self Driving (Supervised) mode. Either way, most people would expect both systems to recognize a brick house and take reasonable measures to avoid ramming into it. Why it did not will undoubtedly be the focus of subsequent litigation. Earlier this month, Zachary Shahan wrote about a report by Reuters about FSD. After interviewing several people who had worked directly on Full Self Driving software, Reuters said they worked for hours training FSD on specific routes to make the system good enough to show off for public events. Despite all that effort, they claimed that deploying FSD broadly without all of that focused work could not be done — the system simply wasn’t good enough. “The staffers said these labor-intensive safeguards are impossible to deploy on a broad scale,” Reuters reported. “Those efforts, which haven’t been previously reported, undermine Musk’s long-stated claim that Tesla’s self-driving technology will soon work anywhere globally and doesn’t require the same laborious local mapping of roads and hazards employed by rivals.” Of the nine former employees interviewed by Reuters, seven said they wouldn’t trust FSD to drive them. One even said he wouldn’t ride in a Tesla robotaxi if someone paid him to do so! “The safety statistics Tesla uses publicly are equally shaky. Researchers found that Tesla inflates its safety numbers by comparing airbag-deployment crashes in FSD vehicles against a federal crash database that includes far less severe incidents, and by bench marking against the average American car, which is considerably older than the average Tesla,” Autoblog reported. “Ten of the eleven researchers who reviewed the methodology told Reuters it read more like marketing than genuine safety analysis.” Cars Gone Wild! More than 15 years ago, Americans woke up to find that sudden unintended acceleration was a thing after a family died in a gruesome crash on a California highway in a Toyota that allegedly suddenly went wild and could not be brought to a halt. What happened has never been made completely clear. In some cases, people who reported that their cars unexpectedly accelerated were found to have pressed the accelerator instead of the brake pedal. It is certainly possible that something like that happened in Katy, Texas, last Friday, but it may be years before we get an answer. In any event, it will probably be a jury who makes the call after listening to a parade of expert witnesses saying diametrically opposite things. It may turn out the errant Tesla Model Y was using Autopilot at the time, not FSD. How that will change the liability situation is unclear. A jury in Miami last year awarded more than $243 million in actual and punitive damages to the estate of a woman who was killed when a Tesla operating on Autopilot blasted through a T intersection in the Florida Keys and slammed into a car she was standing near. According to sources, Tesla could have settled that case for $50 million, but Elon Musk always adopts a pitbull strategy in such cases. In that instance, his pigheadedness cost the company nearly $200 million. That brings us to BYD, which recently announced it will take full legal responsibility for any property damage or personal injuries related to one of its vehicles while using some versions of its God’s Eye technology (only in China). To be fair, the Chinese legal system does not make humongous punitive damage awards. Compensation for personal injuries is awarded on the basis of a table of predetermined values. There is no group of Chinese lawyers flying about in private jets paid for with the money from tort litigation. (See John Grisham’s The King of Torts for a detailed look at how things work in America.) In Other News In what may have been an example of sudden intended acceleration, a man driving a Tesla in New Canaan, Connecticut, recently was attempting to park his Tesla when he accidentally pressed the accelerator and shot backwards through a fence and several trees into a community swimming pool. Mike D’Urso, a young lifeguard at the pool, told WABC News that he and first responders pulled the driver uninjured from a passenger window of the car as it submerged into the pool on Tuesday morning. “Me and my co-worker were setting up the umbrellas when we heard a loud crash and we turned around — and there was a car right in the middle of the pool,” D’Urso told The Guardian. “The car began to sink a couple minutes in, and my concern was that the water would rise above his head and he wouldn’t be able to breathe.” Is Tesla at fault in either of these incidents? Probably not in the case of the car in the swimming pool, but a look at the video of the car crashing into the house in Texas should give everyone the heebie jeebies. The short video from a doorbell camera is worth watching — and super scary! What is most concerning is that there are millions of Teslas on the road. What makes one of them suddenly drive full speed ahead into a building? Regardless of what the driver may or may not have done wrong, any automated driving system should be able to prevent such tragedies, not cause them. No doubt there is more to this story yet to come.
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