Despite the autopilot, your hands always belong on the steering wheel.Image: KEYSTONE
After a fatal accident in Texas, the driver claims that Tesla’s autopilot steered and powered the car. Tesla denies this. The top US traffic safety authority has opened an investigation into the incident.
June 23, 2026, 5:13 p.mJune 23, 2026, 5:13 p.m
Last Friday there was a fatal accident involving a Tesla Model 3 in Houston, Texas. Images show the electric vehicle driving unrestrained into a residential building, fatally injuring a resident who was inside the house. The driver of the car told police that Tesla’s autonomous driving system was activated during the accident.
Now the country’s top traffic safety agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), has opened an investigation into the case. as the Wall Street Journal reports. The authority, which only intervenes in accidents with special circumstances from an engineering perspective, has already opened over 40 such special investigations based on Tesla’s autonomous driving system.
Autonomous driving system is said to have been involved in 211 accidents
While various cases are still ongoing, investigations that have already been completed have resulted in Tesla having to update the software of its autonomous driving system. The US regulator investigated almost 1,000 accidents involving Teslas between 2018 and 2023, resulting in 29 deaths.
In around half of the accidents, the authority came to the conclusion that there was insufficient data for an assessment; in other cases, the use of the autopilot could be ruled out or it could be proven that other factors led to the accident. However, in around 211 accidents, the authority came to the conclusion that the autonomous driving system played a role, as the tech magazine “Engadget” reported.
14 people died in the accidents and 49 were seriously injured. In around 80 cases it was shown that the driver actually had enough time to intervene and prevent the accident. According to the authorities, this is exactly where one of the main problems lies with the autopilot or the full self-driving software, as Tesla calls its software in various degrees.
US regulator objects to Tesla’s marketing
The NHTSA complains that Tesla uses its own marketing to suggest to its customers that the software has full control over the car at all times and that it poses potential dangers. While providers with comparable systems consciously market them as assistance systems, Tesla insists on selling its software as autopilot or as full self-driving, which implies that they can and should drive without human intervention.
Opposite the tech magazine “The Verge” Elon Musk’s company pointed out that its autonomous driving system would regularly warn users that their hands should be on the steering wheel and their eyes should be on the road. However, the NHTSA criticized the safety precautions as inadequate.
The update that was then imposed led to stronger control mechanisms, such as automatically switching off the self-driving system if it increasingly detects that the driver is ignoring the regulations. The addition “Supervised” was also added to the term Full Self Driving.
Musk denies Autopilot’s influence in Houston accident
In the current case in Houston, Ashok Elluswamy, vice president of AI and software at Tesla, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk denied on his own social media platform X that the autopilot was responsible for the accident. Elluswamy wrote that the driver manually pushed the accelerator pedal all the way down during the accident.
Yup. In this case, the driver manually overrode self-driving by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100% of the accel pedal in this residential area. They reached a speed of 73 mph during the crash, and had the accelerator pressed even after the crash.
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) June 22, 2026
Musk added that vehicles in full self-driving mode would only drive slowly in urban areas and not at the speed at which the driver was traveling. The sheriff’s office said the investigation into the current case was ongoing and a decision on whether to file charges had not yet been made.
This is not the first and probably not the last time Tesla has been criticized for its autonomous driving system. Hardly any other car manufacturer has pushed forward the vision of fully autonomous vehicles and large-scale robotaxi networks as aggressively as Tesla. Critics accuse Musk of accepting thousands of accidents and dozens of deaths for his vision.
Concealed accidents and a fine worth millions
A data leak revealed around two months ago that Tesla was concealing thousands of serious incidents with its autonomous driving software until 2022. like the SRF reported. A former service technician at the company provided the data on these incidents the German magazine “Handelsblatt”which then made the incidents public.
Last summer, Tesla was also ordered to pay $240 million to the relatives of a deceased 22-year-old. This was after a Tesla in autopilot mode collided with the vehicle in which she was sitting with her husband.
The husband, who survived the accident with serious injuries and is still suffering from the consequences to this day, said in a recently published documentary on RTS television in western Switzerland that he felt like a human guinea pig when he found out about the allegations against Tesla.
During the investigation into the accident, Tesla claimed that the black box, the device in the car that records the driving data, was damaged and therefore could not provide any data. However, external experts then managed to restore the deleted information. These showed that the company knew about the car’s malfunction the evening before the accident, which led to the accident the following day.