Driver behind the wheel in Tesla crash, NTSB says

Fatal Texas wreck in April raised questions of whether Autopilot was operating

DETROIT — A driver was behind the wheel when a Tesla electric car crashed and burned in April near Houston, killing two men, neither of whom was found in the driver’s seat.

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board announced the findings in an investigative report update released Thursday on the April 17 crash on a residential road in Spring, Texas.

Although first responders found one man in the back seat and the other in the front passenger seat, the NTSB said the driver and a passenger were in the front seats with belts buckled at the time of the crash. It said the Tesla Model S car was traveling up to 67 mph in the five seconds leading up to the crash, and the driver was accelerating.

The investigation is continuing, and the agency made no determination as to whether Tesla’s Autopilot partially automated driver-assist system was running at the time of the crash. The NTSB said it is still looking into Autopilot, whether the men could have had trouble getting out of the car, driver toxicology tests and other items. The agency will make those determinations in a final report.

The report left unclear how or why the driver unbuckled the seat belt and changed positions, although it said the crash damaged the car’s high-voltage lithium-ion battery case, where the fire started.

The trip began at the owner’s home near the end of a cul-de-sac. The car traveled 550 feet before leaving the road on a curve, going over a curb, hitting a drainage culvert, a raised manhole and a tree. The crash occurred on a two-lane road, killing the owner, 59, and the passenger, 69.

In a preliminary report from May, the NTSB said it tested a different Tesla on the same road, and the Autopilot driver-assist system could not be fully used. Investigators could not get the system’s automated steering system to work, but were able to use Traffic Aware Cruise Control.

Autopilot needs both the cruise control and the automatic steering to function.

Traffic Aware Cruise Control can keep the car a safe distance from vehicles in front of it, while autosteer keeps it in its own lane. The report said the road also did not have lane lines.

The NTSB, which has no regulatory authority and can only make recommendations, said it’s working with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on the probe. NHTSA has the power to make vehicle safety regulations. The federal probe is running at the same time as a parallel investigation by local authorities, the NTSB said.

The Texas crash raised questions of whether Autopilot was working at the time. The company says in owner’s manuals and on its website that Autopilot is a driver-assist system and drivers must be ready to take action at any time.

NHTSA has stepped up its investigations into Tesla Autopilot. In August, it opened a formal investigation into the system. The investigation covers 765,000 vehicles. Of the crashes identified as part of the probe, 17 people were injured and one was killed.