Tesla Crashes in Texas Set for Legal Protest

In Texas one evening last week, a 76-year-old grandmother named Martha Avila was standing in the front room of her rural home. Tesla The Model 3 plowed into her brick home at over 70 miles per hour, killing her.

The driver of the truck, Michael Butler, 44, told police he was with them Tesla driver support-which the car maker claims makes driving safer and less – reactive in the event of an accident. Butler did not show “signs of intoxication,” the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, which responded to the crash, said in a report.

Now Avila’s family is suing not only Butler but also Tesla, alleging that the driver’s assistant’s Full Self-Driving (Supervisor), also known as FSD, contributed to his death. The feature is designed to complement other aspects of driving – including navigating city and residential streets, stopping at red lights and stop signs, and changing lanes – but it requires drivers to pay attention and be ready to intervene if the system goes wrong. The lawsuit alleges Tesla’s technology was “structurally flawed and extremely dangerous,” attorneys representing Avila’s daughter and son-in-law wrote in a lawsuit filed in Harris County District Court on Tuesday. (The son-in-law, Justin Barbour, was also in the house and was injured in the crash.)

Tesla did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment. But at X, Tesla’s vice president of AI software Ashok Elluswamy he wrote Tesla’s testimony showed that Butler “manually drove himself and pushed the accelerator up to 100 percent” and “forced the accelerator even after the accident.” Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote that the idea that the company’s technology played a role in the accident “doesn’t make sense.”

Much of the damage has not been released, and it is possible that Tesla’s technology had nothing to do with Avila’s death. But while the driver is largely responsible for what happened, the electronics manufacturer may be found to be partially responsible – and liable to pay more.

“If the product is designed in a way that leaves drivers vulnerable to situations where the system suddenly malfunctions and they lose consciousness, Tesla could be found liable,” says Matthew Wansley, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University who studies automotive technology.

In fact, it happened before. Last year, a Florida federal judge found that the driver of a Tesla Model S was using Autopilot, Tesla’s latest driver assistance software, he was mainly responsible because of the accident where he failed to see that the T-shaped intersection where his car was going was ending. He kept his foot on the accelerator, and the Tesla crashed, killing 22-year-old Naibel Benavides Leon. Her boyfriend, 26-year-old Dillon Angulo, was seriously injured. (Despite often talking about the data-gathering capabilities of its cars, Tesla said it could not retrieve any information related to the lawsuit; lawyers for the Benavides family managed to retrieve it. with the help of a hacker.)

But the jury also found, in a unanimous verdict, that Tesla shared one-third of the blame for the accident because it believed Autopilot was useful. It determined that Tesla is liable for $200 million in punitive damages, and $43 million in restitution. Another judge upheld the decision earlier this year.

Critics of Tesla’s approach argue that it is because the FSD is so good that the format creates a problem. If drivers believe that the system always works well, they may not be willing to take it in case of a problem. In a 2018 California highway crash, the driver behind the wheel of a Model X using Autopilot lost control of the steering wheel before the car hit a curb, killing him. (Tesla then he dismissed the case related to the hours before the breakdown.)