Tesla has agreed to settle another wrongful death lawsuit from a fatal crash involving Autopilot before the case could get to trial later this year.
It’s one of many lawsuits involving several crashes involving Tesla’s advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (Supervised), after the floodgates were open following a watershed trial.
Over the last few years, Tesla vehicles have been involved in numerous accidents involving the automaker’s advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS): Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (Supervised), better known as ‘FSD’.
Despite the names of those feature packages, they are not considered automated driving systems. They are Level 2 driver assistance systems and require the driver’s attention at all times.
Drivers and victims involved in those crashes have often sued Tesla, but the automaker has managed to have the cases dismissed, placing most of the blame on the drivers.
However, things started to change over the last year.
Last year, Tesla settled a wrongful death lawsuit involving a crash on Autopilot that happened in 2018, and last month, the automaker lost its first trial over a crash that occurred in Florida in 2019.
For the first time, a case went to trial before a jury, and they decided to assign a third of the blame for the crash to Tesla for the role Autopilot played. The rest of the blame was assigned to the driver, who had already settled with the victims and their families before the Tesla trial began.
The jury awarded the plaintiffs $243 million. The automaker has made clear its intentions to appeal the verdict.
Before the trial, the plaintiffs offered Tesla to settle for $60 million, and the company refused.
The trial process cost them much more.
The jury didn’t buy Tesla’s usual argument that it couldn’t be blamed because it clearly informs the driver that they are always responsible for the vehicle. The plaintiffs’ lawyers successfully argued that Tesla was careless in the way it deployed Autopilot, without implementing geofencing and marketing it to customers in a manner that encouraged the abuse of the system.
Following the trial results, Electrek reported that the “floogates of Autopilot lawsuits” were open.
There are dozens of additional lawsuits against Tesla involving incidents with Autopilot and FSD, and they are all riding on the verdict as well as all the information that came from the trial.
The same lawyers and law firms that represented the plaintiffs in the trial in Florida are also representing victims and the families in those other lawsuits.
Brett Schreiber, the lead attorney in the Florida case, is also leading Maldonado v. Tesla, another wrongful death lawsuit against Tesla involving its Autopilot feature. The case was set to go to trial in the Alameda State Superior Court by the end of the year.
The case involves a Tesla vehicle on Autopilot that hit a pickup truck on the highway, killing fifteen-year-old Jovani Maldonado, who was a passenger in the pickup truck. His father was driving him back home from a soccer game.
In a new court filing, Tesla and the plaintiffs have requested that the court approve a settlement that the two parties have reportedly agreed upon.
The settlement is confidential.
Electrek’s Take
Like I said, the floodgates are open. We are now starting to see the crashes that occurred in 2018 and 2019 being addressed in court.
This is just the beginning.
Crashes on Autopilot and then FSD have greatly ramped up starting in 2020-2021 with greater delivery volumes and Tesla launching FSD Beta.
I hope that more cases reach trial, as we do learn a lot more about Tesla and its deployment of driver assistance systems through them.
But with how the first one went, I am sure the automaker is much more eager to settle those cases.
However, can it just keep doing that?
There have already been over 50 deaths related to crashes involving Tesla Autopilot or FSD.
As morbid as it sounds, if the going rate for a Tesla Autopilot-related death is around $50 million, that’s already more than $2.5 billion and growing.
This is nuts. Will this continue to happen?
More people die in crashes involving Tesla’s half-baked ADAS products. Tesla continues to compensate the victims and their families with millions each time, essentially using the money it earns from selling the dream of those half-baked ADAS features eventually leading to real autonomy.
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