A 76-year-old woman died on 19 June after a Tesla Model 3 crashed into her home in Katy, Texas, a suburb of Houston. The driver, Michael Butler, told Harris County sheriff’s deputies that he had been using the vehicle’s automated driving system at the time of the collision, according to local authorities. The victim, Martha Avila, was pinned under debris and later pronounced dead at a nearby hospital. Her son-in-law, Justin Barbour, who was also in the house, sustained injuries.

The victim’s daughter, Jennifer Barbour, and her husband filed a lawsuit on Tuesday in Harris County District Court. The suit accuses Tesla of gross negligence, defective design, and failure to warn about dangers in its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems. It alleges that the car’s technology ‘failed to detect the end of the street’ and experienced ‘sudden unintended acceleration,’ and seeks more than $1 million in damages plus punitive damages. The driver, Butler, is also named as a defendant.

Tesla executives, posting on the social media platform X, offered a conflicting account. Chief Executive Elon Musk wrote that the crash ‘makes no sense’ because Full Self-Driving operates slowly on residential streets. Ashok Elluswamy, the company’s vice-president of AI software, stated that the driver had manually overridden the system by pressing the accelerator to 100%, reaching 73 mph (117 km/h), and that the accelerator remained pressed even after impact. The company has not publicly provided evidence for these claims.

The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) confirmed it has opened a special investigation into the crash. The agency has launched nearly 50 such probes since 2016 into incidents involving Tesla vehicles where advanced driver-assistance systems were reportedly in use, with about two dozen fatalities recorded. In March, NHTSA expanded an inquiry into 3.2 million Tesla vehicles equipped with Full Self-Driving over concerns about performance in low-visibility conditions. A 2023 recall of roughly 2 million vehicles sought to strengthen driver-attention warnings.

The Harris County Sheriff’s Office said Butler showed no signs of intoxication and cooperated with investigators. No charges have been filed, and the investigation remains active. The family has released surveillance video of the crash and is raising funds for funeral and housing costs.