United States: Tesla ordered to pay nearly $250 million for fatal accident involving driver assistance systems
The automotive industry likely took a cold shoulder to the verdict handed down Friday, August 1, by a U.S. court that found Tesla partially responsible for a fatal accident in April 2019 involving one of its vehicles equipped with the Autopilot option, its driver assistance technology.
The Austin, Texas-based group, which has announced it is appealing, owes some $242 million (nearly €210 million), Darren Jeffrey Rousso of the Rousso Boumel law firm, which represented rights holders, told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
The issue at stake in this case was the share of responsibility that falls, in the event of accidents, on manufacturers – who are increasingly developing autonomous driving – and on reckless drivers who rely on the assistance system.
An eight-member jury decided Friday, following a trial in federal civil court in Miami, to award the plaintiffs a total of $328 million in damages. Rousso said the jury set Tesla's damages at $200 million. Jurors also awarded $59 million to the estate of Naibel Benavides Leon, who was killed in the crash, and $69 million to her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo, who was injured. Two-thirds of this amount is to be paid by the person who caused the accident, and one-third is to be paid by Tesla.
Hit at full speedAccording to the lawsuit filed against Tesla, the Chevrolet SUV in which the couple was riding while stopped on April 25, 2019, in Key Largo, Florida, was struck at full speed by a Model S, after the car's Autopilot driver assistance system failed to detect it. The young woman, 22 years old at the time of her death, was propelled several dozen meters, the lawsuit continues. Dillon Angulo suffered broken bones and a head injury.
"Today's verdict is wrong and only sets back automotive safety and threatens the efforts of Tesla and the [automotive] industry as a whole to design and implement life-saving technology," the American manufacturer responded.
The jury "found that the driver was largely responsible for the tragic accident," but, Tesla continued, the evidence in the case "proved that the driver was solely responsible because he was speeding, with his foot on the accelerator – which deactivated Autopilot – while trying to retrieve the phone he had dropped and without his eyes on the road."
The plaintiffs' lead attorney, Brett Schreiber, acknowledged that the driver, George McGee, was negligent when he ran flashing lights, a stop sign, and an intersection at 60 mph before crashing into the couple's parked vehicle. But he found Tesla was at fault because its system allowed the driver to act recklessly and use it on secondary roads for which it was not designed.
“I had too much faith in technology”According to Schreiber, Tesla's decision to use the term Autopilot is misleading and life-threatening because the system only helps drivers change lanes, slow down, and perform other tasks, rather than actually driving the vehicle. He supported his point by pointing out that other car brands use terms like "driver assist" and "co-pilot" to ensure drivers don't become overly reliant on the system.
"I had too much faith in technology," George McGee said during his testimony. "I believed that if the car saw something in front of it, it would give a warning and brake," he explained.
Tesla's lead attorney, Joel Smith, explained that the vehicle warned drivers to keep their eyes on the road and their hands on the wheel, but that George McGee chose not to do so while searching for a cell phone that had fallen into the passenger compartment. Smith concluded that the accident was the driver's sole responsibility, noting that the driver had driven through the same intersection dozens of times in his life without having an accident: "The cause [of the accident] was that he dropped his cell phone."
"No car in 2019, and none today, could have prevented the accident," Tesla insisted. "It is a fiction concocted by the plaintiffs' lawyers to blame the car when the driver - from day one - acknowledged and accepted responsibility" for the accident, the manufacturer added.
In the complex trial, plaintiffs' lawyers claimed Tesla withheld or lost key evidence, including data and videos recorded seconds before the crash. " We finally learned what happened that night, that the car was actually defective," the victim's sister said.
The verdict reignites the debate over the reliability of driver-assistance systems and the liability of manufacturers in fatal accidents. Many similar cases against Tesla have been dismissed, and when they haven't, they've been settled by the company to avoid the spotlight.
The World with AP and AFP
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