missing Autopilot – A deadly 2019 crash on Card Sound Road in Key Largo became a yearslong fight over one missing item: the Autopilot snapshot that would show what the car saw. Investigators were told the most important crash data was corrupted and unavailable. But a forensic ext
Dillon Angulo remembers pulling over to look at the stars.
It was about 9:15 p.m. on April 25, 2019, in Key Largo, Florida. He and Naibel Benavides had been inseparable since a few weeks after their first date. Angulo, a 27-year-old Cuban American studying general contracting at Florida International University, was bearded and stocky. Benavides, 22, had moved to Miami from Cuba to live with her mother and become an optometrist.
Their plans were already turning toward the future: during his birthday dinner, Benavides told Angulo she’d been accepted to an optometry school in New York City, then reassured him she wasn’t moving—“I’m gonna stay to be with you,” she said. She made plans to introduce him to her mom.
The night of the crash, Angulo drove her down to the Keys in his black Chevy Tahoe to catch fish so he could cook fresh-grilled yellowtail with mushroom risotto. Outside a bait shop, they snapped a selfie—him wearing a Miami Dolphins hat and a black T-shirt, her in a white crocheted shirt, smiling.
On the road back to Miami, Angulo saw heavy traffic ahead on US-1. To avoid it, he took Card Sound Road, an old two-lane street through undeveloped wetlands and twisting green mangroves. The road was unlit, so dark that the stars looked their brightest. Angulo wanted to show Benavides. so at the end of the road he pulled off behind T-intersection signs onto a gravel patch. They stepped out of the truck.
The rest is fragments. Benavides’s phone fell in the water on the boat earlier that night. Angulo’s memory pieces together the fishing and the calls and the filleting of the yellowtail on the dock—then, suddenly, headlights speeding toward them.
“He’s not sure how long they were standing there before he saw headlights speeding toward them,” the record shows through his account. Angulo said, “I’m like, where’s that car coming from?” Then “the stars went black.”
What followed—drawn from thousands of pages of court filings, depositions, and extensive interviews—became one of the most consequential self-driving disputes in modern times.
The question centered on a single missing piece of evidence: the Autopilot snapshot that could have shown what the car saw in the seconds leading up to the crash.
When the National Transportation Safety Board later criticized Tesla’s Autopilot-related handling of prior deaths. Tesla responded that its owner’s materials explicitly warn Autopilot requires constant driver attention and isn’t a self-driving system. In this case, the dispute didn’t stop at the arguments about Autopilot’s design. It landed on whether the data existed in the first place—and whether it had been preserved.
Tesla’s Autopilot trail had already been full of fatal outcomes.
Earlier. Joshua Brown. a 40-year-old Navy veteran. was killed in Florida when his Model S struck a semitrailer crossing the highway with Autopilot engaged. The car was traveling about 74 miles per hour in a 65 zone. Tesla said neither the Autopilot system nor the driver had seen the white truck against a brightly lit sky. and that in the 37 minutes before impact Brown had his hands on the wheel for around 25 seconds.
In that case, the NTSB called out Tesla for fostering Brown’s disengagement. NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt said at a board meeting that “The system gave far too much leeway to the driver to divert his attention to something other than driving.”
Then came Walter Huang. a 38-year-old Apple software engineer. who died after his Model X veered left and slammed into a concrete divider on Highway 101 on March 23. 2018. Tesla denied responsibility. arguing Huang was inattentive and playing games on his phone; his widow later reached a settlement for an undisclosed amount the day before a trial was set to begin.
On March 1. 2019. Jeremy Banner. a 50-year-old father of three. died after his red Model 3 was switched onto Autopilot while he headed to work before dawn on Highway 441 in Delray Beach. Florida. The NTSB’s crash report found Autopilot’s vision system didn’t detect a tractor-trailer pulling out of a private farm driveway. The car was traveling 68 miles per hour in a 55 zone. did not warn Banner. and slammed into the truck. shearing off its roof. Still on Autopilot, the car continued driving his body down the highway for another 40 seconds.
In Key Largo, the road geometry was different. Card Sound Road was unlit and contained intersections—precisely the type of environment that later became central to the Benavides and Angulo lawsuits.
The Florida Highway Patrol started its response after a 911 call from George McGee.
Traffic Homicide Investigator Cpl. David Riso arrived on scene to find McGee, 44, pacing in a daze beside his smashed black Model S. The front right side of the Tahoe McGee had plowed into was crushed. Angulo lay face up on the ground, shirtless, blood streaming from his mouth, groaning and unable to speak. His pelvis and jaw were shattered, and his brain was bleeding. Riso found no other victims at first and assumed Angulo must have been driving alone.
As more cops arrived, one recorded the scene on a bodycam. McGee told officers he’d been on a call booking a flight when he dropped his phone. then fished around to find it. “The minute I sat up, I hit the brakes and saw his truck,” he said. He’d slammed the brakes too late. he told them. but added that it still “shouldn’t have happened.” He also said he’d been using cruise control—meaning Autopilot.
McGee, a managing partner at a private equity firm who commuted from Boca Raton, had recently bought the Tesla so he could use Autopilot on his 100-mile night drives home to a gated community in Key Largo. He did not respond to requests for comment.
Riso and the officers searched with flashlights. Over 115 feet away, Naibel Benavides’s body lay in a tangled patch of brush. Riso filed his report and began his homicide investigation.
In the days after the crash. he filed warrants to obtain evidence needed to prove what happened and who was responsible. He needed the airbags to study DNA evidence. He sought the data recorder detailing airbag deployment. He wanted everything stored on Tesla’s central dashboard tablet. including connected device activity. GPS and speed records. and McGee’s typical route patterns. He also needed logs that could show whether Autopilot had been engaged. along with what the car’s eight cameras captured in the moments before impact.
Riso retrieved the hardware from the car, including the Autopilot computer—a flat silver box with multicolored video cables tucked above the glovebox.
The NTSB told him that every Tesla Autopilot car was engineered to automatically generate and transmit crash data to Tesla’s headquarters immediately after any crash or near-collision. The Autopilot computer would have stored five seconds of video leading up to airbag deployment. Reconstructing that information could reveal what the computer perceived in real time—and the degree of fault between driver and system.
But the most important data was missing: the Autopilot snapshot that would have shown what the system saw as the Tesla barreled toward the couple.
Riso’s difficulty wasn’t just technical. The structure of Tesla’s system meant investigators were dependent on Tesla, because the company built and controlled every part of the system. When crashes occurred, data was stored in a proprietary format only Tesla could decode.
On May 23, 2019, Riso reached out to Ryan McCarthy, Tesla’s deputy general counsel and head of product litigation. McCarthy told him Tesla was happy to help and asked him to put the request in a detailed letter. McCarthy connected Riso with a technician at a Tesla Service Center in Coral Gables, Michael Calafell.
Three weeks later, Riso testified that he met Calafell and was brought onto a second floor with gleaming Teslas. Calafell told him not to worry: they would run Riso’s Autopilot computer on an exemplar car—essentially a similar vehicle—then swap out that car’s computer with the one from the crash. Calafell wheeled the Autopilot computer up and began the download.
After about 30 minutes, Calafell told Riso the file was corrupted. There was nothing of value on the Autopilot computer, Riso testified. Calafell returned the device along with a thumb drive containing the corrupted data. Riso, now retired in Italy, declined to comment on this story. Calafell, McCarthy, and Tesla did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Afterward. McCarthy emailed Riso the only information Tesla claimed to have received from McGee’s car: infotainment data showing McGee’s 13-minute call with American Airlines ending two seconds after the crash. and a single dashcam video showing McGee running the stop sign. Again. the most important data—the Autopilot snapshot showing what the system had identified and failed to warn in the critical seconds—was missing.
Without it, Riso’s investigation stalled. More than a year after the crash, he closed the case and filed his final report, noting that “Mr. McCarthy has assisted with my investigation in this case and provided me with important evidence.”
For Angulo, the road to recovery began while that evidence dispute was still unfolding.
When Angulo’s parents broke the news of Benavides’s death from the hospital, he imploded. Because of a traumatic brain injury, he couldn’t retain what they told him after he woke up. Each morning, they had to go through the hell of retelling him. Over time, Angulo retained the details of the crash.
When he learned McGee’s car had been on Autopilot, Angulo said he was shocked and furious.
Before the accident, Angulo told an interviewer, “I thought Teslas were super cool cars” and that Elon Musk seemed like “a cool guy trying to help the environment.” Not anymore. “I felt like they experimented on us,” Angulo said. “How is this allowed on the road?”
He was not alone. Regulators had been pressing the limits of Autosteer for years.
In 2020. NTSB Vice Chair Bruce Landsberg called Tesla’s Autosteer—Autopilot’s steering component—“completely inadequate.” Earlier. the NTSB had sent safety recommendations to six automakers urging them to restrict their systems to roads they were designed for and replace steering-wheel sensors with cameras verifying the driver’s eyes were on the road. Five responded with steps they planned to take. NTSB chair Robert Sumwalt said at a public hearing, “Sadly, one manufacturer has ignored us. That manufacturer is Tesla.”.
And other cases kept piling up.
In February 2021. five police officers near Houston were searching a car for drugs when a Tesla Model X rammed through the traffic stop at 70 miles per hour. The driver had been drinking on margarita night at a Mexican restaurant, and the driver used Autopilot. The Tesla slammed into a police SUV, pushing it into three others, injuring the officers and their police dog. The dog survived with minor scrapes, and the officers suffered serious injuries. They filed a $20 million lawsuit against Tesla alleging Musk and the company “vastly and irresponsibly overstated” Autopilot safety. citing a dozen other accidents where Autopilot allegedly failed to detect flashing lights of emergency vehicles.
Back in Key Largo, there was resolution—but not the kind that closed the story.
The Benavides family and Angulo sued McGee for negligence for an undisclosed amount and then received a confidential settlement from him and his insurance company. Angulo’s next fight was against Tesla.
Naibel Benavides’s sister, Neima Benavides, sued Tesla in April 2021, arguing the company had put a dangerous product on the road and failed to tell drivers the truth about what it would do. Angulo filed a separate suit in 2022, and the two cases were later consolidated.
Angulo’s attorney, Todd Poses, framed one pillar of the case around where Autopilot was meant to work.
“The theory of the case is that the car never should have been able to operate on Card Sound Road,” Poses said. “It doesn’t work there, OK.”
The second pillar was deceptive marketing.
The lawsuits pointed to a 0-to-5 SAE International scale. where no vehicle has reached Level 5 full autonomy in any condition without driver action. They contrasted Autopilot—described as a Level 2 system requiring drivers remain alert—with Mercedes-Benz’s Level 3 Drive Pilot and Waymo’s Level 4 robotaxi service under tightly controlled conditions.
Critics—including safety regulators and independent engineers—argued Tesla blurred the line between a driver-assistance tool and a self-driving car. The Center for Auto Safety and Consumer Watchdog told the Federal Trade Commission that Tesla’s marketing practices were so misleading that “reasonable for Tesla owners to believe. and act on that belief. ” that a Tesla with Autopilot is an autonomous vehicle capable of “self-driving.”.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety also found a 2022 survey where 42% of Tesla Autopilot buyers trusted their vehicles to be fully self-driving.
In Angulo’s case, jurors were later shown what the missing data would have clarified.
Tesla’s defense focused heavily on McGee’s actions.
In court filings. Tesla blamed the crash on McGee. arguing he was speeding at 62 miles per hour in a 45 zone and had taken his eyes off the road to reach for his phone. Tesla also argued that if McGee pressed the accelerator beyond the speed limit, Autopilot’s automatic emergency braking was disabled. The company also claimed McGee ignored hands-on-wheel alert chimes and accumulated 23 “strikeouts” in three months of ownership. including one on the night of the crash. Each strikeout triggered a temporary Autopilot lockout that reset once the driver put the car in park and back in drive. Tesla also said the car issued one final alert 1.65 seconds before impact.
But for the families suing Tesla, the missing crash snapshot was the missing puzzle piece.
After a suit was filed, Poses received a call from McCarthy offering what Poses called “money to get rid” of them. The families refused to settle and pushed for trial.
While the civil case moved, regulatory scrutiny intensified. In August 2021. Senators Edward Markey and Richard Blumenthal called on FTC Chair Lina Khan to investigate Tesla’s “potentially deceptive and unfair practices” in marketing its automation systems. pointing to a 2019 YouTube video posted by Tesla showing a car driving autonomously—viewed more than 18 million times by then—and Musk’s repeated claims that full autonomy was just around the corner. “Tesla drivers listen to these claims and believe their vehicles are equipped to drive themselves—with potentially deadly consequences. ” the senators wrote.
In 2022, the Department of Justice opened a criminal probe into whether Tesla misled consumers, investors, and regulators about Autopilot capabilities, and Tesla was never charged.
In December 2023. a major investigation reported that at least eight fatal or serious Tesla crashes—including the Key Largo crash—occurred on roads where Autopilot should not have been enabled. Three days later. federal safety regulators announced the largest recall in Tesla’s history: more than 2 million vehicles equipped with Autopilot systems would receive software fixes after regulators found safeguards against driver misuse were “insufficient.” Tesla disputed the story on X. calling it “particularly egregious in its misstatements.”.
On the day of the recall announcement, Angulo and the Benavides family held a press conference.
For the first time, Angulo met face-to-face with Benavides’s family. “I was grateful,” Angulo said later. “They looked me in the face, and that meant a lot to me, because I do feel guilt. I pulled over.” He said he would carry the rest of his life with the knowledge that he didn’t bring their daughter back home.
The recall didn’t give the families what they needed most: proof from the crash data.
To produce that kind of proof, their lawyers needed the augmented visualization showing what the Autopilot system had seen and done seconds before impact—exactly what Tesla said it couldn’t provide.
In November 2024, Tesla’s outside counsel at Bowman and Brooke, Thomas Branigan, wrote to Poses’s team stating that the data transmitted to Tesla did not include either the crash video or snapshot data and that Tesla could not produce an “augmented” clip.
At that point, the Autopilot computer had already sat in an evidence facility for five years. The victims’ legal team subpoenaed the Florida Highway Patrol, retrieved the computer, and asked Tesla’s counsel for help extracting the data.
Poses said Tesla’s response was immediate and unambiguous: Tesla wasn’t participating. “Basically, they told me to go fuck myself,” he said.
The families decided they would try to retrieve the data themselves, without Tesla’s tools.
That effort led to Green—the reclusive Russian-born hacker and Tesla tinkerer known online as GreenTheOnly.
Poses and his team drafted a motion to compel Tesla to cooperate and attached a link to Musk’s “Paint It Black” video as Exhibit A for the driverless dream the public had been sold. A judge granted the order, but the families still refused to hand Tesla the motherboard. “We can’t trust these guys,” Poses said. Their question became: who could get the data out without Tesla’s involvement?.
Green arrived.
Green told Poses he had come to the US 20 years earlier and worked in high-performance supercomputing. He said he enjoyed taking apart Tesla computers at home. In the hacker world, he described himself as a white-hat participant through Tesla’s “Bug Bounty” program. He said he stumbled into Tesla’s systems while investigating a possible software licensing violation and bought a salvage computer to prove his concerns. He added that Tesla’s IP counsel took his calls seriously and that a security team member offered $15. 000 per vulnerability he resolved.
Green and the legal team met over Zoom.
Tesla told the court it had never received the full “tarball”—the compressed archive of crash data automatically transmitted after a collision. Tesla also said Michael Calafell found the Autopilot data corrupt and inaccessible.
Green told Poses neither claim held up. He said Card Sound Road had adequate cellular coverage. meaning there was no technical reason the full data package could not have streamed to Tesla’s servers. And Green said the claim that Tesla received one video file didn’t add up—because the data is transmitted as a single package.
He also said the corruption story didn’t make sense. Like the legal team. he suspected that the “corrupted data” narrative was about Tesla’s handling. not about the original capture. He said the good news was that even if something had been erased. the data was recoverable from the Autopilot computer itself: “The undead programs do exist. ” he explained.
In October 2024, Green, the victims’ legal team, and Tesla representatives gathered at the Florida Highway Patrol evidence facility in Miami. A former Secret Service cybersecurity expert. Jason Lewis. who now ran a consulting firm in Tampa. was there to assist and certify the process and to verify that forensic protocol was followed.
After five hours, Green extracted the data from the computer. Poses later said, “We were fucking giddy.” Lewis made four thumb drives containing forensic clones of the data—one for each party.
To try to resurrect the augmented crash visualization outside Tesla’s view, Green, Poses, and Lewis went to a Starbucks. Green opened his laptop and worked while the others waited. Unlike Calafell, who used Tesla’s own extraction software, Green worked directly at chip level, bypassing Tesla’s tools.
In the end, Green pointed to the evidence on screen. “Here’s the line of code that says the data was sent to Tesla,” he said. “Here’s the line of code that says they received it.”
The families had what Tesla had said did not exist: the data, including the augmented video detailing the crash frame by frame, one-hundredth of a second at a time.
The augmented video showed Autopilot identifying and processing critical elements: a blue perimeter line marking the outer boundary of drivable space. the approaching end of the roadway. the stop sign. a blinking red light. a stationary car directly in the vehicle’s path. and a glimpse of the two pedestrians behind the truck. Despite that, Autopilot issued no forward collision warning and no proactive alert. Tesla’s automatic emergency braking also never fired.
The failure was striking because of how Tesla’s system perceives the world.
Unlike Waymo and nearly every other serious competitor that combines cameras with LiDAR and radar for redundancy. Tesla had bet everything on cameras alone. Musk called LiDAR “a crutch” and argued that because humans drive with eyes, machines should too. But critics in the record said cameras can struggle with stationary objects. poor lighting. and unusual road geometries—places where radar or LiDAR can compensate.
In the augmented video. as the Tesla sped toward the Tahoe. the projected-path line—the system’s real-time calculation of where it intended to drive—began lurching wildly. as if the software was cycling through options with nowhere to go. At one point, it projected a route heading directly into the SUV. The system never engaged drivable-space braking. Only in the final seconds before impact did Autopilot abort. flashing a “take over immediately” prompt and handing control back to a driver who had no time to react. It didn’t slow the car and didn’t steer.
Lewis, watching the augmented video, formed his own view of what the company had been doing. “When I see stuff like that,” he said, “it is typically indicative of a company trying to hide evidence and obstruct.”
A few weeks later, a federal judge ruled the suit would proceed to trial.
On July 14, 2025, at the US Courthouse in Miami, the lawyers began by displaying the augmented video of the crash on multiple monitors. Benavides’s mother was in the room along with her family and Angulo. They left during the presentation.
Jurors watched frame by frame as McGee’s car passed the stop sign and struck the Tahoe, where for a brief moment a blur of Angulo and Benavides could be seen.
Jurors also watched the “Paint It Black” promo from 2016.
During cross-examination. Tesla’s corporate representative Eloy Rubio Blanco confirmed that the final cut of the video had omitted something: as the car drove triumphantly into Tesla headquarters. it clipped a fence. but that scene wasn’t included because. Blanco said. “the goal of the video was to show the hardware capabilities and how the feature was going to behave in the future.”.
Blanco also testified that, as of 2019, Tesla’s Automatic Emergency Braking would not fire in a T-intersection collision—the precise scenario that killed Benavides.
Missy Cummings. a former Navy fighter pilot. MIT roboticist. and autonomous vehicle safety expert. testified that Tesla had never disclosed this limitation to owners. When asked why she thought Tesla didn’t geofence the technology in 2019 while other manufacturers did. Cummings said. “I believe they were using that as a way to sell more cars.” She also addressed Musk’s claim that Tesla could drive safer than a human. “It wasn’t true then,” she told the jury. “and it isn’t true now.”.
From the witness stand, Tesla representatives argued in line with a pattern seen in earlier cases: no technology available in 2019 could have prevented the crash and McGee was solely to blame.
Yet Tesla’s evidence story unraveled as testimony continued.
Tesla had maintained it never received the full set of crash data from McGee’s Autopilot computer. But David Shoemaker. Tesla’s Autopilot manager. testified in a deposition that Tesla either received the complete dataset or nothing at all. Shoemaker also testified that McCarthy had told him Tesla received a partial transmission—footage from only one of the car’s eight cameras.
Poses pressed him to explain how the rest vanished. Shoemaker’s explanation was that someone at Tesla took affirmative action to delete it, saying it was “very unlikely” that Tesla deleted one particular snapshot and that it was more likely a large batch delete job was involved.
Alan Moore, an NTSB-certified forensic engineer and accident reconstructionist with 30 years of experience, agreed with the core issue. “The moment Calafell plugged those computers in,” Moore told interviewers, “they started overwriting the data that was on them. Whether it was intentional or just a lack of knowledge, Tesla’s involvement basically worked to damage the data.”.
Moore’s view placed the blame squarely on Tesla’s handling rather than on the original capture.
Calafell. described as a field technical specialist whose job involved handling damaged batteries. had been tasked by Tesla’s legal department to download Autopilot logs—work. the record says. he had no forensic training for. Calafell confirmed that he had not safeguarded the data before connecting and powering up the computer and that no one in the service department was ordinarily permitted to pull Autopilot logs.
On the witness stand and in declarations, contradictions followed.
Calafell had signed a sworn declaration under penalty of perjury stating that he never received or powered up the Autopilot computer on June 19. 2019. with photographs intended to support that claim. But in later testimony. Calafell said he hadn’t written it and that the order to prepare the declaration came from Tesla’s legal department. He later said the order had come from a different internal supervisor. Under questioning about the affidavit. Calafell said he hadn’t looked at it carefully enough and that it was his fault.
The jury decision was the largest verdict ever handed down against Tesla: $243 million in damages.
On Aug. 1, the jury found Tesla placed the 2019 Model S on the market “with a defect” that was a legal cause of damage.
Poses’ team advanced three key arguments to sway jurors: the owner’s manual warned Autopilot should only be used on controlled-access highways. but Tesla had built no technical safeguards preventing drivers from switching it on anywhere the car detected lane markings; the driver monitoring was insufficient to ensure the person behind the wheel was actually paying attention; and Tesla’s marketing had been designed to foster a false sense of what the technology could do.
The jury assigned Tesla 33% of the fault and McGee 67%. McGee was not the defendant; the case was against Tesla alone. Tesla was ordered $243 million in damages: $19.5 million to the Benavides family, $23.1 million to Angulo, and $200 million in punitive damages.
It marked the first time in Tesla’s history that a jury found it liable in a wrongful death case tied directly to Autopilot operation.
Tesla vowed to appeal. In a statement. it said the verdict was wrong and would set back automotive safety and jeopardize Tesla’s and the industry’s efforts to develop life-saving technology. The company denied wrongdoing, insisting no car in 2019 or today could have prevented the crash. It also said the case was “never about Autopilot” and called it a fiction concocted by plaintiffs’ lawyers blaming the car.
Tesla also told a major investigation that it had not intentionally suppressed the data needed for the augmented video and that it simply could not find it.
After the verdict, federal action continued. Two months later. the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Office of Defects Investigation opened a preliminary investigation into Tesla to assess the “scope. frequency. and potential safety consequences” of Full Self-Driving executing driving maneuvers that constitute traffic safety violations covering nearly 2.9 million vehicles.
By December 2025, the documented violation count had jumped from 58 incidents to 80, and NHTSA demanded crash data, complaints, lawsuits, and internal analyses.
In March 2026, regulatory pressure escalated further. NHTSA upgraded a separate probe into Full Self Driving’s handling of reduced-visibility conditions—sun glare. fog. and camera-blinding road hazards—into an engineering analysis covering more than 3.2 million vehicles. a step typically preceding a recall.
In parallel. a California administrative law judge ruled after a five-day hearing that Tesla’s use of “Autopilot” followed “a long but unlawful tradition” of ambiguity to mislead consumers. and that “Full Self-Driving” was “actually. unambiguously false and counterfactual.” Tesla dropped the Autopilot name in January 2026 to avoid a suspension of its dealer license. then filed suit against the California DMV in February to reverse the ruling.
The judge’s central finding was described as especially damaging: the Full Self-Driving degradation detection system. designed to recognize when cameras can’t see properly and alert the driver. fails under common roadway conditions. Tesla, the ruling said, had spent a decade marketing that same system as the future of safe driving.
For Angulo, the legal fight has never been abstract.
When he visited the crash site months after the verdict, he drove through the mangroves on Card Sound Road. He can’t fish from a boat anymore because of his shattered pelvis. Still, he can wade into shallow water and spearfish, a small mercy amid everything else. Seven years after the accident, he requires physical therapy three times a week and struggles with constant fatigue.
Angulo was asked what he could say to Elon Musk if given the chance.
“I’m mad that you put other people’s lives at risk to develop this technology,” he said. Then he paused and added, “How can you do this?”
Just as the Key Largo case widened, Tesla’s alleged pattern of issues continued to draw investigators.
On June 19. a Tesla Model 3 left a residential street at 73 miles per hour in Katy. Texas. slammed into a brick home. and killed 76-year-old Martha Avila as she stood in her living room. The driver said he was using Full Self-Drivin. Musk posted on X that the allegation “makes no sense.” Tesla AI Head Ashok Elluswamy claimed the driver “manually overrode self-driving by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100%. ” and the NHTSA opened a probe.
Even as multiple federal investigations run concurrently, Musk’s broader ambitions have continued. After SpaceX went public this month in the largest IPO in history, raising $75 billion, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell hinted publicly at a merger with Tesla.
Meanwhile. Tesla expanded its Robotaxis—using a more advanced version of the same camera-only Full Self-Driving technology—across Austin. Dallas. and Houston. Rollouts in Phoenix, Las Vegas, and elsewhere were said to be coming soon. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January. Musk promised Robotaxis “will be very. very widespread by the end of this year.”.
Back on Card Sound Road, Angulo’s question remains grounded in the night he remembers and the evidence he says was treated like it could disappear.
How does a company let that happen—then ask the public to trust the system anyway?
Tesla Autopilot Full Self-Driving crash data NHTSA NTSB lawsuit GreenTheOnly Dillon Angulo Naibel Benavides Ryan McCarthy Michael Calafell Jason Lewis Elon Musk Robotaxi