A federal safety agency has backed Tesla's account of a fatal Texas crash — and undercut the driver's story.
The National Transportation Safety Board released preliminary findings this week confirming that 44-year-old Michael Butler manually overrode Tesla's Full Self-Driving system in the moments before a collision that killed a grandmother. Butler had told police last month that autopilot was engaged and responsible for the crash. Electronic data reviewed by the NTSB showed he pressed the accelerator pedal to 100 percent while in a residential area. Tesla VP of AI software Ashok Elluswamy had already cited internal vehicle data to make the same claim; the NTSB findings align with that account. Elon Musk also weighed in on X, arguing that FSD "drives slowly through neighborhood streets" and a high-speed crash was proof of a manual override.
The NTSB's preliminary report doesn't assign cause — that comes later — but the data point is significant. Tesla has faced years of scrutiny over how it markets and names its driver-assistance features, and cases where drivers shift blame to automation put that framing under a spotlight. When a system is called "Full Self-Driving," it shapes how people think about who is responsible behind the wheel.
The final NTSB report will matter more than this one, but for now the evidence points to a familiar pattern: the car logged what happened, and the log contradicted the driver.