Tesla CEO Elon Musk has spent over a decade making misleading promises about his carmaker’s so-called “self-driving” software.
The company’s Autopilot and erroneously-named “Full Self-Driving” driver assistance features have been linked to hundreds of collisions and dozens of deaths since then. But instead of being held responsible for its CEO’s misleading claims in court, Tesla has largely opted to settle with the victims, often fighting tooth and nail to prevent important crash data from reaching the public.
That all changed earlier this month, when a federal jury in Florida found Tesla partially liable for a fatal 2019 crash involving Autopilot, requiring Tesla to pay as much as $243 million — nearly a quarter-billion dollars — in punitive and compensatory damages to the parents of a 22-year-old woman who died in the crash, as well as her surviving boyfriend.
To legal experts, it could set a dangerous precedent for the EV maker.
“This will open the floodgates,” Miguel Custodio, a car crash lawyer not involved in the lawsuit, told the Associated Press after the ruling. “It will embolden a lot of people to come to court.”
The lawyer behind the game-changing verdict, Brett Schreiber, is understandably smug. As The Verge reports, he posted a video on Instagram a day later, with a fitting song choice: “Damn It Feels Good To Be a Gangsta,” an iconic 1992 hip hop anthem by the Geto Boys.
It may sound like an unnecessarily bragadocious way to handle himself — but the verdict does stand out in a long line of legal skirmishes Tesla has been through thanks to its flawed driver assistance software.
In an interview with The Verge, Schreiber noted how he used Musk’s words against him.
“My theme in my closing argument was about Tesla’s choices and Tesla’s words,” he said.
“There’s Tesla in the showroom and then there’s Tesla in the courtroom,” Schreiber told the publication. “And Tesla in the showroom tells you that they’ve invented the greatest full self-driving car the world has ever seen. Mr. Musk has been peddling to consumers and investors for more than a decade that the cars are fully self-driving, that the hardware is capable of full autonomy.”
“And those statements were as untrue the day he said them as they remain untrue today,” he said.
Schreiber also claimed that Tesla was well aware of its software’s shortcomings and that drivers were misusing it constantly.
The EV maker is an outlier in a growing list of carmakers developing advanced driver assistance software (ADAS) tech.
“This was not a car company that got into tech,” Schreiber said. “This was a tech company that got into cars,” adding that Tesla knowingly “released a beta product” to the public.
Worse yet, Musk decided to scrap LIDAR and radar sensors altogether since 2019, forcing Tesla’s driver assistance systems to rely exclusively on cameras, raising concerns among critics.
That could also have devastating implications for Tesla’s robotaxi service, which has already caused plenty of chaos on the streets of Austin, Texas, despite its extremely limited rollout.
This week, shareholders sued Tesla and Musk as part of a proposed class action lawsuit, claiming that the billionaire had hidden significant risks with the company’s robotaxis.
“I would say that this verdict hopefully sends a very clear message to Tesla,” Schreiber told The Verge after being asked about Tesla’s robotaxi service. “That they need to do better. They need to elevate people’s lives and people’s safety over greed and profits.”
Schreiber is already gearing up for “round two,” a separate case in the Alameda State Superior Court that involves the family of a 15-year-old boy who died in a 2019 crash with a Tesla on Autopilot, later this year.
More on the case: “This Will Open the Floodgates”: Tesla In Trouble as Jury Orders It to Pay $329 Million After Autopilot Death
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