Ashok Gupta
This week, Tesla defeated a lawsuit that blamed the company’s Autopilot for a 2019 crash, reports , On Friday, a California state court jury found that driver assistance software was not to blame for the Model S crash that left the vehicle’s driver with a fractured jaw, missing teeth and nerve damage. Justin Hsu sued Tesla in 2020 after his EV pulled into a center median on a Los Angeles city street while Autopilot was engaged. It sought more than $3 million in damages, alleging defects in the software and design of Tesla’s airbags.
Tesla denied responsibility for the accident. It argued that Hsu used Autopilot on a city road, a practice the company warns against in the software’s user manual. The jury awarded Sue no damages and said the automaker did not willfully fail to disclose facts about Autopilot. As reuters Note, the test is believed to be one of the first tests to include the driver assist mode. While the result will not be “legally binding in other respects,” it is expected to inform how lawyers deal with technology-related incidents in the future.
The outcome of the case is also unlikely to ease the investigation Tesla already deals with over its claims of Autopilot and “full self-driving” software. At the beginning of the year, the automaker confirmed that the US Department of Justice has added the two features. The company is under investigation by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for its involvement in Autopilot collisions.