Federal regulators will investigate the Tesla crash that killed a Texas woman

The top federal auto safety agency said Monday it is investigating a Tesla crash that killed a woman Friday night in Katy, Texas, near Houston.

The driver was using Tesla’s automatic assistance system when his Model 3 left the road “at a high rate of speed” and crashed into a house, local officials said. The woman in the home, Martha Avila, 76, was taken by medical helicopter to a hospital where she was pronounced dead, the Harris County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement Saturday. The driver did not show signs of intoxication, the authority said.

A spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the division of the Transportation Department that opened the federal investigation, said he could not provide details. According to agency websitesuch “special accident investigations” are intended to investigate accidents that occur under unusual circumstances.

No charges had been filed against the driver as of Monday afternoon, the sheriff’s office said. “Once all the evidence is gathered, it will be presented to the Harris County District Attorney’s Office to determine if charges are appropriate,” a representative for the office said in an email.

Ms. Avila’s daughter, Jennifer Barbour, he told KHOUto a Houston television station that she didn’t know where to place the blame. “I don’t know if it’s his fault or the car’s fault or what really happened,” she said, adding: “I’ve never seen a car go that fast.”

Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The company’s assistance systems — Autopilot and Full Self-Driving — have been involved in a number of accidents, some of which have been fatal.

In 2023, Tesla recalled more than two million vehicles after federal regulators said the company did not do enough to ensure drivers remained alert while using Autopilot, a system that can steer, accelerate and brake cars automatically.

Tesla owner manuals tell drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and take over if something goes wrong while using Autopilot or Full Self-Driving. However, lawsuits and police reports have documented cases where drivers became distracted and failed to intervene before a crash.

In 2024, Tesla settled a lawsuit that blamed the automaker’s driver assistance software for the death of a California man in 2018. The man, Wei Lun Huang, died after his Tesla Model X veered off a freeway in Mountain View, California and hit a concrete median barrier. Mr. Huang’s family filed a lawsuit that blamed autopilot malfunctions for the crash.