In mid-April, a Tesla crashed into a tree in a suburb outside of Houston, and it took firefighters four hours to put out flames fueled by the car's battery pack. When the fire was out, they concluded that neither of the car's two occupants had been in the driver's seat at the time of the crash. A Tesla executive later broke with that official account and claimed that a person had been in the driver's seat. A National Transportation Safety Board spokesman later said Tesla was "working with" the investigation but is "not a party" to it, a break with typical procedure that suggests a strained relationship between Tesla and regulators.

Electric carmaker Tesla says a vehicle involved in a fatal crash in California was in Autopilot mode, raising further questions about the safety of self-driving technology. One of the company's Model X cars crashed into a roadside barrier and caught fire on 23 March. Tesla says the 38-year-old driver, who died shortly afterwards, had activated Autopilot moments before the accident. But they did not say whether the system had detected the concrete barrier. "The driver had received several visual and one audible hands-on warning earlier in the drive," a statement on the company's website said.