A driver was behind the wheel when a Tesla electric car crashed and burned last 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 both the driver and a passenger were in the front seats with belts buckled at the time of the crash.
The agency said the car was traveling up to 67 mph in the five seconds leading up to the crash, and the driver was accelerating. Data from the car’s fire-damaged event data recorder revealed that at times, the accelerator pedal was pressed as high as 98.8%, the NTSB report said.
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 update report left unclear how or why the driver unbuckled the seat belt and changed seating positions, although it said the crash damaged the Tesla Model S’s high-voltage lithium-ion battery case, where the fire started.
The fatal trip began at the owner’s home near the end of a cul-de-sac, and home security video showed the owner getting into the driver’s seat and the passenger entering the front passenger seat, the report said. The car traveled about 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 around 9:07 p.m. on Hammock Dunes Place, a two-lane residential road. Both the 59-year-old owner and the 69-year-old passenger were killed.
In a preliminary report from May, the NTSB said it tested a different Tesla vehicle 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. That could have have been why the automatic steering wouldn’t work.
The agency says it intends to issue safety recommendations to prevent similar crashes.
Local authorities said one man was found in the front passenger seat, while another was in the back.
