A Tesla Cybertruck running Autopilot on the 69 Eastex Freeway in Houston reached a Y-shaped interchange last August and chose the wrong path. Where the road curves right, the vehicle drove straight into a concrete barrier. Driver Justine Saint Amour disengaged the system and grabbed the wheel. She was too late.
The resulting lawsuit, filed in Harris County district court and reported by the Houston Chronicle, seeks more than $1 million. It names the failure precisely: no LiDAR, no effective emergency braking, and a CEO whose override of his own engineers produced the design.
That last allegation is not rhetorical. It is a theory of the case. And it fits a pattern that runs well beyond the Eastex Freeway.
Tesla’s Own Taxonomy
LiDAR reads curves. It uses light to measure three-dimensional space ahead of the vehicle. Tesla’s own engineers recommended it. Every serious competitor — Waymo, Cruise — built their systems around it. Musk called it “freaking stupid” and chose cheap camera arrays instead.
NHTSA’s investigation EA22002 analyzed 467 Tesla crashes and found 111 roadway departures where Autosteer was inadvertently disengaged by the driver. Almost all occurred within five seconds. The agency also found that Autopilot resisted manual steering inputs — a system actively discouraging the correction it simultaneously required.
Tesla’s engineers built an internal taxonomy for this. They run a crash database query program allegedly called Cabana. Mode confusion is one of their own category labels: the driver believes the car is steering when it isn’t. When Tesla denied in formal litigation that more than 200 such crashes existed, their own lawyer corrected the number in open court. Tesla then filed Recall 23V838 covering two million vehicles for exactly this failure — while explicitly stating in the filing they did not agree the defect existed. A software patch. No redesign. NHTSA found crashes continued and opened an inquiry into whether the recall worked.
Tesla is now fighting in federal court to keep expert testimony about the recall and the pattern away from juries.
Saint Amour’s dashcam footage, provided to the Chronicle by her lawyers, shows the sequence: ramp, fork, divider managed, turn begun, then straight into the sidewall. Hood open. Body panels separating. She was diagnosed with two herniated discs in her lower back, one in her neck, sprained wrist tendons, and neuropathy in her right hand. The next object past the barrier was the freeway below.
The Man Who Decided
The Saint Amour complaint alleges negligent hiring and retention of Elon Musk as CEO, asserting that his participation in product design decisions contributed to unsafe outcomes. Tesla’s own engineers recommended the sensor that reads curves. He overruled them. That is the paper trail the lawsuit is walking.
A straight-line, no curves, commitment runs through the biography.
Musk grew up in Pretoria under apartheid. His maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, was, according to Errol Musk’s own account, “fanatical” in support of apartheid and supportive of Nazism. Errol Musk was elected to the Pretoria City Council in 1972 and ran a construction and engineering business wealthy enough to support two homes, a yacht, a plane, and five cars. He dealt in emeralds from a Zambian mine — confirmed in his own interviews. Elon left at 17, partly to avoid military conscription into the system’s enforcement apparatus.
Apartheid was a system opposed to any changes, arguing against a steering wheel because white nationalist infrastructure murders anyone who dares to diverge. Its architecture — pass laws, Bantustans, labor controls — was built to arrest a curve that was already visible and documented. The demographic and political trajectory of southern Africa was known. The system went straight anyway. It crashed in 1994.
The beneficiaries of that system were not confused about what it was doing. They were experiencing, in the language Tesla’s engineers later coined, mode confusion in reverse: trusting a system that had already disengaged from any viable future.
Dismantling the Steering Infrastructure for Curves
The U.S. Civil Rights Division was established in 1957 precisely to institutionalize accountability for straight-line power — to build enforcement mechanisms that would force institutions to negotiate with legal and demographic reality. Since January 2025, 70% of its attorneys have departed. Roughly 250 lawyers — the voting rights section, the police accountability section, housing enforcement — are gone. The new leadership has redirected the division toward investigating noncitizen voters and “anti-Christian bias.” The Fair Housing Act no longer appears in its housing guidance. The Voting Rights Act barely appears in its voting guidance.
Across the federal government, DOGE — the operation Musk funded and runs — has closed civil rights offices at the Social Security Administration, the Department of Education, and agencies throughout the executive branch. The agency that should pull Saint Amour’s telemetry and formally count this crash among ADAS failures — NHTSA — now operates under an administration run by the CEO of the company it regulates.
Waymo launched driverless commercial service in Houston last month using LiDAR-equipped vehicles. The comparison the Saint Amour lawsuit invites will be made in front of a Harris County jury. This is about a system built to read the actual road ahead versus one built by a man with a documented, multigenerational commitment to only looking backwards and rigidly refusing to adapt.
Attorney Bob Hilliard’s statement lands exactly where Tesla’s own documents already sit:
This company wants drivers to believe and trust their life on a lie: that the vehicle can self-drive and that it can do so safely. It can’t, and it doesn’t.
Tesla’s engineers called out the failure. It has a name: mode confusion. They thought they were describing a car, but it’s a man in denial of history.
