On April 21, a California jury found in favor of Tesla in an accident involving a vehicle with autopilot-enabled driver assistance. According to the evaluators, the autopilot was not at fault for the damage done to the driver.
Los Angeles resident Justin Su filed a lawsuit against Tesla in 2020, alleging that his car stalled due to an autopilot malfunction, recalls Reuters.
The incident caused the airbag to deploy “so forcefully that it broke Plaintiff’s jaw, knocked out her teeth, and damaged a nerve in her face.”
The woman claimed design flaws in the autopilot and airbag and demanded more than $3 million in damages.
Tesla denied responsibility for the accident, and its representatives separately focused on the fact that the driver used Autopilot on city streets, despite a warning in the owner’s manual about the dangers of such use of the software. .
As a result, Su was awarded zero damages by the Los Angeles Superior Court. During the investigation it was also found that the airbag was working properly.
Following the verdict, Tesla shares rose 1.3% to close Friday at $165.08.
Su broke down in tears as he left the courtroom after the verdict was delivered. One of her attorneys, Donald Slavik, expressed disappointment with the outcome of the case. Tesla’s attorney, Michael Carey, declined to comment.
This is a precedent case, since it is the first time that a court has ruled on an accident related to partially automated driving software.
And while the trial results are not legally binding on other similar cases, experts believe that in the future this case will be used by lawyers for Tesla and other companies to build winning strategies in similar processes.
Case Western Reserve University School of Law professor Cassandra Burke Robertson, who specializes in cases involving self-driving cars, said the verdict “provides an indication of how subsequent cases are likely to play out.”
The main question in such situations is always who is responsible for the crash when the car is in driver assistance mode: human driver, software autopilot or both?
Ed Walters, who teaches a course on autonomous vehicles at Georgetown Law School, called the verdict a “huge victory” for Tesla.
“This case should be a wake-up call to Tesla owners: they can’t rely too much on Autopilot and they really need to be ready to take over as Tesla isn’t a self-driving system yet,” he said.
Tesla is currently preparing for a series of other lawsuits related to a semi-automated driving system that Elon Musk claims is safer than human drivers.
Author:
Ekaterina Alipova
Source: RB
I am a professional journalist and content creator with extensive experience writing for news websites. I currently work as an author at Gadget Onus, where I specialize in covering hot news topics. My written pieces have been published on some of the biggest media outlets around the world, including The Guardian and BBC News.
