Enlarge image
Wreck of the burned-out Tesla at the accident site in Texas
Photo: Scott J. Engle / REUTERS
The crash of a Tesla electric car in Texas, which hit the headlines in April, was, according to accident investigators, less mysterious than the local police initially thought.
The local officials at the time had the impression that nobody was behind the wheel in the accident.
The renowned investigative authority NTSB has now come to the conclusion that both front seats were occupied when the impact occurred and the driver pressed the accelerator pedal.
The car with the 59-year-old owner and its 69-year-old passenger only covered around 170 meters before it got off the road.
The vehicle hit a tree and the battery caught fire.
The car largely burned out.
The local police in a suburb of the city of Houston, Texas initially assumed that no one had been behind the wheel in the accident.
The officers found one of the men dead in the front passenger seat and one in the back seat in the burned-out vehicle.
This quickly raised the question of whether Tesla's controversial assistance system "Autopilot" could have been active.
Tesla had denied from the start that "autopilot" could have been activated on the route.
At first it was said that the data memory of the vehicle had been badly damaged.
However, the NTSB managed to recover information from the device.
In this case, you relieve the "autopilot" system.
At the same time, the NTSB restricted the fact that so far these were only preliminary findings of the investigation.
Elon Musk defended himself against allegations
Tesla boss Elon Musk had denied a connection with the assistance system from the start and wrote on Twitter in April that the data available until then showed that the "autopilot" system had not been activated.
Musk pointed out that the lane marking was missing on the road, without which the standard version of the system could not be activated.
However, Tesla's "autopilot" has been criticized for a long time.
Videos are circulating on the Internet showing drivers leaving their seats in traffic, and the US consumer organization Consumer Reports succeeded in bypassing the safety precautions of the system.
Critics complain that the name "autopilot" invites negligent use.
Tesla even calls the next stage of the program "full self-driving", completely self-driving, although according to current criteria it remains just an assistance system.
oka / dpa