Ruling clears way for lawsuit brought against company over fatal crash in 2019 in which Stephen Banner was killed near Miami

Judge finds ‘reasonable evidence’ Tesla knew self-driving tech was defective::Ruling clears way for lawsuit brought against company over fatal crash in 2019 in which Stephen Banner was killed near Miami

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    9·
    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    A judge has found “reasonable evidence” that Elon Musk and other executives at Tesla knew that the company’s self-driving technology was defective but still allowed the cars to be driven in an unsafe manner anyway, according to a recent ruling issued in Florida.

    The lawsuit, brought by Banner’s wife, accuses the company of intentional misconduct and gross negligence, which could expose Tesla to punitive damages.

    The ruling comes after Tesla won two product liability lawsuits in California earlier this year focused on alleged defects in its Autopilot system.

    “It would be reasonable to conclude that the Defendant Tesla through its CEO and engineers was acutely aware of the problem with the ‘Autopilot’ failing to detect cross traffic,” the judge wrote.

    Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor, told Reuters that the judge’s summary of the evidence was significant because it suggests “alarming inconsistencies” between what Tesla knew internally, and what it was saying in its marketing.

    “This opinion opens the door for a public trial in which the judge seems inclined to admit a lot of testimony and other evidence that could be pretty awkward for Tesla and its CEO,” Smith said.

    The original article contains 462 words, the summary contains 195 words. Saved 58%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

    • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.worldEnglish
      26·
      1 year ago

      “It would be reasonable to conclude that the Defendant Tesla through its CEO and engineers was acutely aware of the problem with the ‘Autopilot’ failing to detect cross traffic,” the judge wrote.

      If that’s what this centers I don’t think this necessarily a correct ruling

      That semi was moving fairly slowly as it was crossing the road as any semi would from a stop.

      Radar does not detect stationary objects at high speeds, which this slow moving cross traffic vehicle could look like. I imagine there’s some limit where a cross traffic item moving very slowly would appear for all intents and purposes stationary as it fills the entire roadway horizontally and not just a portion of it.

      The car explicitly warns you that Radar won’t detect stationary objects at high speeds. Other manufacturers explicitly warn about this very same problem as well.

      It’ll be interesting to see what happens with this case, but if that’s what it hinges on, IMO, it doesn’t look good for the plaintiff.

      • SatanicNotMessianicEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        Here’s the basis of the finding:

        Palm Beach county circuit court judge Reid Scott said he had found evidence that Tesla “engaged in a marketing strategy that painted the products as autonomous” and that Musk’s public statements about the technology “had a significant effect on the belief about the capabilities of the products”.

        Judge Scott also found that the plaintiff, Banner’s wife, should be able to argue to jurors that Tesla’s warnings in its manuals and “clickwrap” were inadequate. He said the accident is “eerily similar” to a 2016 fatal crash involving Joshua Brown in which the Autopilot system failed to detect crossing trucks.

        The bot that parses the articles creates a worse summary than you’d get by just reading random sentences.

        In any case, we should note that this finding was reached after the recent media disclosures that Musk and Tesla deliberately created a false impression of the reliability of their autopilot capabilities. They were also deceptive in the capabilities of vehicles like the cybertruck and their semi, as well as things like range estimation, which might show a pattern of deliberate deception - demonstrating that it is a Tesla company practice across product lines. The clickthrough defense compared to what the CEO says on stage on massively publicized announcements sounds to me a bit like Trump’s defense that he signed his financial statements but noted that by doing so he wasn’t actually confirming anything and the people who believed him are the ones to blame.

        Given his groundless lawsuit against media matters and his threats against the ADL, I think Elon might have started circling the drain.

        • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.worldEnglish
          21·
          1 year ago

          Ah, that makes a lot more sense. Shouldn’t trust the bot.

          I’d only add that the “click through” is actually a well laid out screen with info graphic showing the problem and a few lines of text.

          They’d be hard pressed to say that warning was difficult or hard for anyone to read or understand.

          Unrelated but relevant, but like GDPR where privacy explanations need to be short, concise and easy to understand, I’d say the click through thing was more than adequate and would exceed those.

          But as you point out, that’s only a part of it.

          Edit: trying to find an image of it for reference, but my GoogleFu is failing me :(

          Edit: to further clarify, I’m only talking about the radar and stopped vehicles in terms above. The whole agreement I think was larger in some places, but my memory is a little foggy on that without images.