A fatal single-vehicle departure in Missouri
At approximately 3 p.m. on April 14, 2025, a 2024 Tesla Model Y traveling south on Interstate 35 in Daviess County near Pattonsburg, Missouri, left the west side of the roadway and struck a guardrail. The driver, a 64-year-old woman from Raymore, died at the scene. Public accounts attributed the original observations to the Missouri State Highway Patrol and noted that the woman was wearing a seat belt. Her personal name was withheld in the available report pending family notification; AIDeaths does not infer or invent her identity. This is one fatality and a separate incident from the Arizona and Texas Tesla crashes that were added earlier to the archive.
Evidence of driving assistance from federal reporting
On September 10, 2026, Electrek published a match between the April 2025 patrol-reported event and a Tesla crash report to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration under the Standing General Order for Level 2 driver-assistance systems. The public report identifies the vehicle as a 2024 Model Y near Pattonsburg, the incident time as 20:03 UTC, the fatal impact with a fixed object and a reported pre-crash speed of 73 miles per hour in a 70 mph zone. Tesla reported that driver assistance had been engaged and that the vehicle's event-data recorder and telematics were available. The exact 'Verified Engaged' label applied to later Tesla filings should not be retrospectively claimed here: Electrek noted that the April 2025 report predated that more explicit field, though the report's inclusion still indicated engagement within the federal reporting threshold.
What has not been disclosed
Several fields that would be important to determine causality were redacted by the manufacturer in the public crash submission, including the detailed narrative, software and hardware versions, the feature identity and whether it was operating within the intended domain. It therefore cannot be determined from the public report whether the car was using basic Autopilot or Full Self-Driving (Supervised). Neither can it be established that the system held control of the steering at the point of departure, that it failed to maintain its lane or that it allowed the car to move over the edge due to a perception error. Other possibilities include human steering or accelerator inputs, an unexpected road condition, driver incapacitation or a mechanical problem. No such alternative was proven in the sources reviewed either.
The role of the human driver and the system
Tesla's consumer automated-driving features in 2025 were SAE Level 2: they assisted with certain parts of vehicle control but legally and functionally required attentive human supervision. Even a vehicle whose assistant is engaged may require intervention to avoid a road edge. That design characteristic does not allocate legal blame on its own. Establishing any contribution by the system would require timing of commands, driver inputs, road geometry, sensors and recording of warning or disengagement states. The available public NHTSA filing and law enforcement summary do not resolve those questions. A useful archive should present the system's presence separately from proof of malfunction.
Corroboration and limitations of the data matching
The matching analysis used the month, exact area, car model and model year, police investigating agency and reported time: 20:03 UTC corresponds to approximately 3:03 p.m. local central daylight time. Electrek said this was the only matching fatal Tesla crash on that section of I-35 in April 2025. An independent public NHTSA-record index lists the case under report ID 13781-10553, with Pattonsburg (misspelled 'Pattronsburg'), April 2025 and 73 mph; that index derives from the same manufacturer report and does not count as a second independent technical investigation. Missouri's patrol maintains official reports and public-record request procedures, but the underlying fully detailed individual patrol report was not supplied in the verified sources. The media match is strong enough to document reported system presence without implying that the agency verified a defect.
Legal and regulatory status
The event is part of a federal safety surveillance dataset, not a criminal charge against Tesla or a judicial product-liability determination. NHTSA Standing General Order reporting is based on qualifying circumstances and an engaged Level 2 feature, not a determination that a system initiated or caused a crash. A reported pre-crash speed exceeding the posted limit by 3 mph does not by itself prove driver misconduct or algorithmic responsibility. No final engineering analysis, unredacted telemetry or court judgment was verified through October 24, 2026. In particular, there is no basis to assert that the car deliberately drove itself into the guardrail.
Archive inclusion and classification
AIDeaths counts one death with verified reporting of engaged driver-assistance technology, while explicitly marking causal responsibility unresolved. The mechanism is a single-vehicle roadway departure and guardrail impact; the system's specific actions remain unknown. The archive uses an approximate Pattonsburg map location rather than the exact roadside crash point. The driver remains unnamed unless a trustworthy later source establishes the identification. Its value to the archive is documented use of a modern driver-assistance system in a fatal event, not confirmation that AI caused the collision.