Tesla goes to trial over fatal autopilot crash

By Madlin Mekelburg Bloomberg Tesla Inc is on trial over proposes that the company is partly to blame for a fatal crash in Florida that occurred when the Autopilot system in a Model S allegedly failed to detect a parked SUV Related Articles Musk suggests Tesla shareholders will vote on xAI outlay Tesla plans robotaxi expansion to Bay Area in a month or two A reignited Trump-Musk feud burns Tesla investors shares of EV company tumble Tesla sales plunge again as anti-Musk boycott shows staying power and rivals pounce on the weakness Apple Alphabet and Tesla are holding the S P rally back Family members of the woman killed in the crash Tesla engineers and auto-safety experts are expected to provide testimony in a federal courtroom in Miami during the jury trial which started Monday and is set to last three weeks Only a handful of Tesla crash cases have gone to trial The electric car maker has struck confidential accords to resolve several cases that blamed defective instrument for deadly accidents Musk is under enormous investor pressure after the company s stock has been battered first by his close affiliation with President Donald Trump and then by his dramatic falling out with the president Musk has staked Tesla s future in part on autonomous driving as the company makes a big push to launch a robotaxi business In the Miami circumstance like others before it Tesla has pinned its defense on driver error The driver of the Model S had engaged the driver-assistance system but had dropped his mobile phone and wasn t watching the road while reaching for the device on the floorboard That s when the car went through a T intersection in Key Largo and off the pavement striking a parked Chevrolet Tahoe whose two occupants were standing outside the wagon Naibel Benavides Leon was killed in the collision Her estate sued Tesla as did Dillon Angulo who was gravely injured The lawsuit seeks compensation for clinical expenses wrongful death and pain and suffering as well as punitive damages for what a lawyer for the plaintiffs described as grossly negligent and intentional conduct by Tesla Everyone at Tesla knew that Autopilot couldn t do what Mr Musk revealed and it still can t do multiple of the things he noted it could do attorney Brett Schreiber notified jurors in opening arguments calling the accident a preventable tragedy and alleging that the automated system failed to respond when it detected the end of the roadway Should the driver have been paying better attention Sure Schreiber noted So should have Autopilot The lawyer recounted the jury that Tesla claimed to not have key records about the crash recorded by the car s computer We were able to get this information that Tesla had denied long before this lawsuit ever happened they denied ever having it he mentioned A lawyer for Tesla Joel Smith countered that the crash had nothing to do with Autopilot equipment and reported it was caused entirely by distracted driving Smith announced the driver of the Model S George McGee spent minutes on the phone with airline customer function for upcoming movement to a funeral before he dropped his phone and started looking for it one of the largest part dangerous things you can do He noted a video recording by a camera in the Model S overlaid with figures from the car s computer shows that McGee was pressing the accelerator to miles kilometers per hour over the posted speed limit leading him to override the car s adaptive cruise control before he went off the road This is one of the best pieces of evidence for Tesla in this scenario We d never hide it Smith reported We didn t think we had it but turns out we did The defense attorney explained facts recovered from the car shows that McGee had safely traveled through the intersection where the crash happened almost times in the same Model S Smith mentioned the driver is on the record saying he knew his car would not drive itself and would not stop at a stop sign The lawyer noted that the mechanism to do so had not yet been developed in Was he distracted because he was using the Autopilot feature that he used all the time No Smith stated He was distracted because he was looking for his dropped cell phone He repeatedly notified the jury McGee was not a complacent driver but an aggressive one Michael Brooks executive director of the Center for Auto Safety a consumer advocacy group disclosed in an interview the affair will be the first to test the theory of liability that Tesla failed to warn consumers about the limitations of its driver-assistance system This affair has the possible to set a marker in the sand about just how far juries are willing to go one way or the other Brooks noted in an interview The intriguing part of this development will be seeing how much blame the jury places on the driver but also how much blame they want to place on Tesla In June US District Judge Beth Bloom dismissed suggests of defective manufacturing and negligent misrepresentation The lawsuit had argued that Tesla falsely advertised its Autopilot capabilities beyond what the bus in fact possessed Bloom sided with Tesla and stated there was no basis for such a claim McGee is expected to testify at trial Jurors are also slated to hear expert testimony from Mary Missy Cummings a George Mason University professor who has been critical of Tesla s automated-driving systems When she was appointed to serve as senior safety adviser at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in Musk called her extremely biased against Tesla and Tesla fans signed a petition against her Cummings has served as an expert witness in at least two other lawsuits against Tesla related to the Autopilot system according to court filings The automaker won two previous trials in California after juries detected that accidents blamed on Autopilot one fatal and one not were due to driver error rather than the company s system In the company was determined just responsible for the death of an -year-old whose Model S slammed into a concrete wall in Fort Lauderdale Florida while he was speeding The jury declared the teen and his father were at fault for the crash The company s near-perfect record in court carries the peril that any adverse verdict could be seen as undermining Musk s oft-repeated claim that his electric vehicles are the safest ever made Tesla faces three more trials over fatal Autopilot crashes in the next nine months in California It s also scheduled to go to trial in Houston over a scenario brought on behalf of five police officers badly injured on the side of a freeway when a Tesla on Autopilot plowed into a parked squad car at miles kilometers per hour The episode is Benavides v Tesla -cv- US District Court Southern District of Florida Miami More stories like this are available on bloomberg com Bloomberg L P