Tesla pushes back on Autopilot narrative after fatal Texas crash
Key takeaways
- The crash occurred Friday night when a Tesla Model 3 driven by Michael Butler left the road and slammed into the home of Martha Avila, who was airlifted to a hospital and later pronounced dead.
- But Tesla, a company that famously dismantled its PR department years ago and often responds to press inquiries with a poop emoji, broke from its usual silence Monday to push back.
- Ashok Elluswamy, the director of Tesla s Autopilot software and the first engineer hired for the Autopilot team back in 2014, took to X to offer a very different account of what the data showed.
A fatal weekend crash in which a Tesla plowed through a brick home in Katy, Texas, killing a 76-year-old woman, set off alarm over the company s self-driving technology, but by Monday afternoon, Tesla was fighting back against the framing.
The crash occurred Friday night when a Tesla Model 3 driven by Michael Butler left the road and slammed into the home of Martha Avila, who was airlifted to a hospital and later pronounced dead. Butler told Harris County sheriff s deputies that the vehicle was on Autopilot at the time. That detail spread quickly, and by the weekend the story had become the centerpiece of long-running debate over Tesla s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving features.
But Tesla, a company that famously dismantled its PR department years ago and often responds to press inquiries with a poop emoji, broke from its usual silence Monday to push back.