“NHTSA is launching a special crash investigation into this crash,” an agency spokesperson said.
A representative of Tesla, which is owned by trillionaire Elon Musk, did not respond to a request for comment on the crash or the investigation.
The fatal crash occurred around 20:00 local time (03:00 GMT) on Friday. The driver of a Tesla Model 3 “failed to drive in a single lane, left the roadway, and struck the residence”, the police report stated.
In a statement given to local media the night of the crash, Sergeant Alex Turman of the Harris County Sheriff’s Office said the vehicle “failed to turn right at an intersection and, at a high rate of speed, crashed directly into a house”.
The 76-year-old woman who was inside the home was struck in the crash and was taken to a hospital, but she died of her injuries, the officer added.
In an interview with a local station of CBS, a BBC partner, the woman’s daughter said she discovered her mother in the house after the crash.
The woman lived with her daughter, son-in-law and their three children, all of whom were also at home at the time of the crash.
“My mum was such a caring woman,” the daughter said, external in the interview.
The driver was also taken to hospital and was cooperating with the investigation into the crash, police said.
The police gave no indication of what caused the car to speed off the road and into the home, but Turman did say that one line of investigation by police was the driver’s claim that he was driving at the time using an automated driving system.
“We’re still evaluating what caused the car to fail to control its speed just before this crash,” he said.
A special crash investigation from the NHTSA is the most “in-depth and detailed” form of inquiry the agency does, according to its website. It is separate from the local police investigation.
Such investigations often cover emerging technology in vehicles in order for the agency to gather data on crashes that can then be used to improve safety performance in autos more widely.
While the investigation is not intended to immediately penalise a car manufacturer, it can lead to safety recalls or other actions.
Tesla refers to its automated driving technology as “full self-driving (assisted)”.
The technology has been criticised as misleading in its abilities, and earlier this year the NHTSA expanded an investigation, external into it over its potentially poor performance in inclement weather.
Last week, Democratic Senators Edward Markey and Richard Blumenthal sent a letter, external to the NHTSA demanding that the agency investigate Tesla’s full self-driving (FSD) technology for its safety risks.
“Tesla has claimed its FSD technology is safer than human driving, but the claims are based on misleading data analysis, such as comparing unlike crash outcomes, comparing new vehicles to the entire US vehicle fleet, and relying on incomplete crash data,” the senators wrote.
They also urged the agency to require more information be reported by car companies utilising autonomous driving technology.
Companies like Tesla, Google (which owns Waymo), and Uber are all testing and operating cars that operate with no human driver present at all.
Waymo recently recalled thousands of its cars in Texas over issues with the vehicles not avoiding flooded roads.
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