Tesla Safety in Federal Autopilot, Tesla Safety Autopilot

 Tesla Safety in Federal Autopilot, Tesla Safety Autopilot

 

A wrongful death case over Tesla's crash-prone Autopilot driver assistance system was started this week in a federal court in Miami. Although Tesla Autopilot has been implicated in deadly traffic accidents before, this is the first time the issue has been considered by a federal court.

The death of Walter Huang in California in 2018 when his Tesla Model X crashed into a concrete highway divider is arguably the most well-known legal case utilizing Tesla Autopilot to date. After suing Tesla in April 2024, Huang's family quickly reached a private settlement with the carmaker.

Additionally, Tesla resolved a different Autopilot case earlier this week that concerned Jeremy Banner's 2019 death. In that instance, the banner man was killed when Tesla's sensors failed to identify a tractor-trailer on the highway and collided with it, severing the top of the vehicle.

In a federal action concerning a fatal crash in Florida in 2019, Tesla has not yet reached a settlement with plaintiffs. In that instance, Nibel Benoîts and Dillon Angulo were standing next to their car, stargazing, when George McGee's Tesla drove through a stop sign in the Florida Keys in April 2019. Benoîts was killed, and Angulo suffered a traumatic brain injury.

In 2023, Angulo told an NBC journalist, "I feel like we were being tested, and this technology was on the road before it was safe."

What were the opinions of the experts?

Former fighter pilot and expert in autonomous systems Missy Cummings made some jokes. "It is my professional opinion that Tesla's Autopilot is defective because Tesla has intentionally allowed the car to operate in operational domains for which it was not designed," Cummings, who was abused by Tesla fans after being named senior advisor to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in 2021, told the court.

Tesla's use of cockpit monitoring to keep drivers vigilant "is not sufficient to keep the driver engaged," Cummings told the court. Additionally, Tesla has a lengthy history of encouraging "autopilot misuse and abuse." In her testimony, Cummings discussed her work at NHTSA looking into past deadly Tesla collisions, including Joshua Brown's death in 2016, as well as some of her agency's dealings with the automaker.

He informed the court, for instance, that Tesla "clearly acknowledged that mode confusion is a problem — it's where people, for example, think the car is on Autopilot and don't realize that Autopilot has disengaged."

Additionally, Cummings referenced a deposition from Ajshay Phatak, a firmware developer for Tesla Autopilot. The firm didn't retain accurate records of Autopilot crashes before to 2018, according to Phatak's deposition to the court. Cummings said that "it was evident that they knew they had a big problem with people ignoring warnings, ignoring hands-on requests."

It is not the first time that Tesla has abused statistics to create false safety claims: In 2017, Ai discovered that the data did not corroborate Tesla's assertion that Autopilot decreased crashes, demonstrating that driver assistance actually increased crash rates.

In his evidence, Mendel Singer, a statistician at Western University School of Medicine, expressed dissatisfaction with Tesla's handling of crash data. Singer stated that the automaker was not comparing it to Like and that he was "not aware of any published studies, any reports that are independently conducted… where [Tesla] actually had the raw data and could validate it to see if it made sense."

"Regardless of whether safety systems are deployed or not, police reports are used to count non-Tesla crashes," Singer stated. Additionally, Singer noted that Tesla has been making false safety claims on its website for years. "It would have been a really quick and easy rejection," he said in response to a question about whether he would have approved a paper from Tesla about its reports for peer review.

Tesla may still be able to reach a settlement, but the issue may possibly go to trial.

In this instance, the plaintiffs have already reportedly secured a fair sum of compensation from the driver of the disputed Tesla. According to author and seasoned Tesla observer Edward Niedermeier, "this makes it much less likely that they will accept the kind of settlement offers that Tesla is making, and it's more about fairness."

However, the court has rendered some unsatisfactory rulings on confidentiality on significant matters, so it is probable that Tesla may rule in their favour. Additionally, they may raise their settlement offer to such an extent that it would be impossible to reject," Niedermeier stated. 

 

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