Crash investigators in America have worked out what happened in a Tesla crash in Houston that looked like it could’ve taken place when no driver was at the wheel.

In April 2021, Police there said they believed “no one was driving” the fully-electric 2019 Tesla when the accident happened. The report said there was a person in the passenger seat of the front of the car and in the rear passenger seat of the car.

Now NBC News and the Associated Press report that National Transportation Safety Board experts have worked out the 59-year-old driver apparently moved to the back seat after slamming into the car’s front air bag, deforming the steering wheel in the crash.

The car could not have been in driverless mode because the road’s lining was not good enough, and while it could have been using “Traffic Aware Cruise Control”, it would only work up to the maximum speed on the suburban road of 30 mph.

The 2019 Tesla reached 67 mph two seconds before hitting the second of two trees at 57 mph before being consumed by flames as the lithium-ion battery caught fire.

“Although the driver’s seat was found vacant and the driver was found in the left rear seat, the available evidence suggests that the driver was seated in the driver’s seat at the time of the crash and moved into the rear seat postcrash,” NBC quotes the report.

(Picture – KPRC TV Houston)