Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in 2016 that the company’s Autopilot technology was safer than a human driver.
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A Florida judge said there is evidence Elon Musk knew Tesla’s self-driving software was defective. He ruled a lawsuit over the death of a Model 3 driver who collided with a truck can go to trial.Tesla’s controversial Autopilot feature is facing multiple legal challenges and investigations.
Elon Musk is facing yet another legal headache over Tesla’s Autopilot feature.
In a court ruling last week, a Florida judge said that there was “reasonable evidence” to conclude that the billionaire and other Tesla executives knew that the company’s automated driving system was defective but allowed it to be sold anyway.
In the ruling, which was first reported by Reuters, Judge Reid Scott allowed a 2019 lawsuit against the company over the death of Jeremy Banner to go to trial.
Banner was killed in 2019 when his Tesla Model 3 drove under a tractor-trailer while the Autopilot system was engaged, shearing off the roof of the car.
His family accused Tesla of gross negligence and intentional misconduct in the lawsuit, saying that the company was aware of issues with the Autopilot system but continued to oversell its capabilities.
The court found that Banner’s crash was “eerily similar” to a 2016 crash that killed a Tesla Model S driver named Joshua Brown, with both involving a failure to detect crossing trucks, and that as a result, Tesla would likely have been aware of the Autopilot issue.
The judge stressed that there was only enough evidence to suggest that it was “reasonable” to say that Musk and other executives had been aware, with the final outcome of the case still to be decided at trial.
Musk has faced controversy over some of his statements on how advanced Tesla’s self-driving technology really is. In 2016, he stated that Autopilot was probably better than a human driver and that autonomous driving was “basically a solved problem.” His second statement was made after Brown was killed.
Tesla has also been criticized for a marketing video it released in October 2016, which showed an Autopilot-equipped vehicle navigating a city and claimed the car was “driving itself” — Reuters later reported that the video was partially staged.
Analysis by the Washington Post in June found that there have been 736 crashes involving Teslas with Autopilot since 2019, with 17 people dying in accidents.
The judge directly pointed to Tesla’s marketing and Elon Musk’s posts on the subject, saying the company “made strong public statements and engaged in a marketing strategy that painted the products as autonomous” despite the technology behind it being “flawed.”
It’s the latest in a series of legal threats that Musk and Tesla have faced over the company’s controversial self-driving technology.
In October, Tesla won a similar legal battle in California when a jury ruled that Autopilot was not responsible for a 2019 crash that killed a driver and left two passengers severely injured.
The company is under investigation by the Department of Justice over its self-driving marketing claims and also faces a separate National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigation into crashes involving Teslas.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.