A judge has found “reasonable evidence” that Elon Musk and other Tesla executives knew the company’s self-driving technology was defective but allowed the cars to be driven in an unsafe manner anyway, according to a recent ruling in Florida.
Palm Beach County Circuit Court Judge Reid Scott said he had found evidence that Tesla “engaged in a marketing strategy that portrayed the products as autonomous” and that Musk’s public statements about the technology “had a significant effect on reliance on the products’ capabilities”.
The ruling, reported on Wednesday, clears the way for a trial over a fatal crash in 2019 north of Miami involving a Tesla Model 3. The vehicle collided with an 18-wheeler that had turned onto the road into the path of driver Stephen Banner, shearing off the Tesla’s roof and killing Banner.
The lawsuit, brought by Banner’s wife, accuses the company of willful misconduct and gross negligence, which could expose Tesla to punitive damages. The ruling comes after Tesla won two product liability lawsuits in California earlier this year over alleged defects in its Autopilot system.
Judge Scott also ruled that the plaintiff, Banner’s wife, should be able to argue to a jury that Tesla’s warnings in its manuals and “clickwrap” were inadequate. He said the accident was “eerily similar” to a 2016 fatal crash involving Joshua Brown, in which the Autopilot system failed to detect a crossing truck.
“It would be reasonable to infer that defendant Tesla, through its CEO and engineers, was well aware of the problem with ‘Autopilot’ failing to detect cross traffic,” the judge wrote.
Banner’s lawyer, Lake “Trey” Lytal III, said they were “extremely proud of this result based on the evidence of criminal conduct”.
The judge also cited a 2016 video showing a Tesla vehicle driving without human intervention, which was used to market Autopilot. At the beginning of the video, there is a disclaimer stating that the person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. “The car drives itself,” it says.
Judge Scott said: “There is no indication in this video that the video is aspirational or that this technology doesn’t currently exist in the marketplace,” he wrote.
Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, said the judge’s summary of the evidence was significant because it suggested “alarming inconsistencies” between what Tesla knew internally and what it said in its marketing.
“This opinion opens the door to a public trial in which the judge seems inclined to allow a lot of testimony and other evidence that could be quite embarrassing for Tesla and its CEO,” Smith said. “And now the result of that trial could be a verdict with punitive damages.”
