10:09 am, April 26, 2023
Tesla has won a significant court victory after a state jury in California ruled that its Autopilot wasn’t at fault in a crash.
The EV maker had been sued by LA woman Justine Hsu, who claimed that while it was on Autopilot, her Model S – similar to the one pictured above – swerved into a kerb.
That triggered an airbag ‘so violently it fractured [the] plaintiff’s jaw, knocked out teeth, and caused nerve damage to her face’, according to the writ.
She had been claiming $3m (circa £2.4m) in damages from Elon Musk’s company after saying Autopilot and the airbag had design faults, reported Reuters.
But Tesla denied being liable for the accident and counter-filed that Hsu used Autopilot on city streets in spite of the user manual warning against doing so.
It was understood to be the first trial over an accident that involved the partially automated driving software.
The Los Angeles Superior Court jury awarded Hsu no damages and found as well that the airbag didn’t fail to perform safely, nor that Tesla intentionally failed to disclose facts.
Tesla says Autopilot and the more advanced Full Self-Driving systems don’t make cars autonomous, and that drivers need to be ‘prepared to take over at any moment’.
Ed Walters, who teaches about autonomous vehicles at Georgetown University Law Centre, said the verdict was a ‘huge win’ for Tesla.
Reuters quoted him as saying: ‘This case should be a wake-up call to Tesla owners: they can’t over-rely on Autopilot, and they really need to be ready to take control – Tesla is not a self-driving system.’
But Raj Rajkumar, who is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, warned: ‘When fatalities are involved, and they are on highways, jury perspectives can be different.
‘While Tesla won this battle, they may end up losing the war.’
The verdict isn’t legally binding in other cases, but Reuters said experts reckon the trial indicates the way things are changing and will help Tesla and other lawyers for plaintiffs sharpen their strategies.
Cassandra Burke Robertson, a professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, who has made a study of self-driving car liability, said early cases ‘give an indication of how later cases are likely to go’.
In the meantime, Tesla’s claims about self-driving capabilities are being probed by the US Justice Department, while the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is looking into the technology’s safety.
