Published on 6/23/2026
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Last update: 18:51 (Mecca time)
A Tesla Model 3 accident claimed the life of a 76-year-old woman in her home in the US state of Texas, after the car deviated from its lane and accelerated until it crashed into the house. Its driver said he was using the car’s self-driving system, but the US authorities have not yet confirmed the cause of the accident, according to a report by the American news site CNBC published yesterday, Monday.
Immediately, the US Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced a special investigation into Tesla cars following the accident, which is the latest in a series of previous accidents involving Tesla cars in self-driving mode.
For his part, Tesla CEO Elon Musk took a defensive stance on his company, and expressed through his account on the “X” platform his doubts about the accident because the self-driving system drives slowly in the streets and residential neighborhoods, indicating that the car in the clip was traveling at a high speed.
Ashok Eluswamy, Tesla’s vice president for the Autopilot system, supported Musk’s point of view, noting that the driver manually turned off the self-driving feature by pressing the accelerator pedal fully. He added, “Their speed reached 117 kilometers per hour during the collision, and the driver remained pressing the accelerator pedal even after the accident.”
The story of the car driver, Michael Butler, contradicts the point of view of Musk and the Tesla management, as the leader explained in his conversation with the Harris County police – the site of the accident – that he was relying on the self-driving system, according to a CNBC report published yesterday, Monday.
For its part, the Harris County Sheriff’s Office reported that they are still evaluating the cause of the accident and are trying to determine the reason for the loss of control of the car, without confirming the use of self-driving mode or its absence.
In a related context, a report from the American newspaper “The Wall Street Journal” indicates that the National Traffic Safety Administration has opened more than 40 special investigations into accidents in “Tesla” cars and the self-driving technologies included in them.
Accidents resulting from self-driving technologies in Tesla cars are among the most common and widespread accidents in the United States of America. In July 2025, a British newspaper “The Guardian” reported that more than 2,400 cases witnessed unjustified acceleration of “Tesla” cars while using self-driving mode, and more than 1,500 complaints of braking problems.
Why are there so many accidents in self-driving Tesla cars?
The Guardian report at the time reveals gaps in Tesla’s mechanism for recognizing and collecting accidents that occur to its cars while using self-driving mode, as the reports do not include any accidents in which the airbags did not explode.
The data Tesla shares about these incidents also includes a set of gaps that make it difficult to determine how many times the self-driving system was actually effective, according to the report.
Accidents caused by the autonomous driving system can be attributed to 3 main reasons:
- Sudden acceleration of the car without the intervention of the driver
- Sudden stopping of the car without the intervention of the driver
- The self-driving system stopped one second before the accident, which does not give the driver a chance to correct the accident before it happens.
An independent report from the website Electrek, which is concerned with electric cars, adds that Tesla’s self-driving system relies on a group of lenses that monitor the road and translate what it sees on it, in addition to using a group of algorithms that cannot be tracked, which increases the risk of the situation.
