Lawsuits test Tesla claim that drivers are solely responsible for crashes

Multiple civil cases -- and a federal investigation -- contend that Tesla’s technology invites ‘drivers to overly trust the automation.’

By Trisha Thadani
April 28, 2024 at 8:00 a.m. EDT

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Dash-cam footage from June 2023 shows a Tesla traveling south on the northbound side of a highway in Tennessee. (Video: Obtained by The Washington Post)

SAN FRANCISCO — As CEO Elon Musk stakes the future of Tesla on autonomous driving, lawyers from California to Florida are picking apart the company’s most common driver assistance technology in painstaking detail, arguing that Autopilot is not safe for widespread use by the public. ... At least eight lawsuits headed to trial in the coming year — including two that haven’t been previously reported — involve fatal or otherwise serious crashes that occurred while the driver was allegedly relying on Autopilot. The complaints argue that Tesla exaggerated the capabilities of the feature, which controls steering, speed and other actions typically left to the driver. As a result, the lawsuits claim, the company created a false sense of complacency that led the drivers to tragedy.

Evidence emerging in the cases — including dash-cam video obtained by The Washington Post — offers sometimes-shocking details: In Phoenix, a woman allegedly relying on Autopilot plows into a disabled car and is then struck and killed by another vehicle after exiting her Tesla. In Tennessee, an intoxicated man allegedly using Autopilot drives down the wrong side of the road for several minutes before barreling into an oncoming car, killing the 20-year-old inside.

Tesla maintains that it is not liable for the crashes because the driver is ultimately in control of the vehicle. But that contention is coming under increasing pressure, including from federal regulators. Late Thursday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched a new review of Autopilot, signaling concern that a December recall failed to significantly improve misuse of the technology and that drivers are misled into thinking the “automation has greater capabilities than it does.”

Meanwhile, in a surprising twist, Tesla this month settled a high-profile case in Northern California that claimed Autopilot played a role in the fatal crash of an Apple engineer, Walter Huang. The company’s decision to settle with Huang’s family — along with a ruling from a Florida judge concluding that Tesla had “knowledge” that its technology was “flawed” under certain conditions — is giving fresh momentum to cases once seen as long shots, legal experts said. ... “A reckoning is coming as more and more of these cases are going to see the light of a jury trial,” said Brett Schreiber, a lawyer with Singleton Schreiber who is representing the family of Jovani Maldonado, 15, who was killed in Northern California when a Tesla in Autopilot rear-ended his family’s pickup truck in 2019. ... Tesla did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the lawsuits.

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By Trisha Thadani
Trisha Thadani joined The Washington Post in 2023 from the San Francisco Chronicle. She covers the technology industry. Twitter https://twitter.com/TrishaThadani