Photo by Monroe County Sheriff’s Department, Via New York Times
Attorneys for Tesla filed a decision requesting a court to throw a recent $ 243 million sentence against the company, which was a deadly crash in Florida in 2019.
To catch up on what is that, the $ 243 million Autopilot Wrongful Death Case ends early this month. It was the first actual lawsuit against the company in an autopilot-uretating death case-there does not count previous settlements outside the court.
The case was centered around a crash in 2019 by a Model S in Florida, where the driver fell his phone, and while he picked it up, Model S drove through a stop sign at a T-interesting, crashed into a parked Chevy Tahoe, who then hit two pedestrians, killed one and seriously injured the other.
Tesla was also caught withholding data in the case, which is not a good look.
In the end, the driver for compensatory damage was found 67% responsible and Tesla was found 33% responsible. But Tesla was also beaten by $ 200 million in penalties. The plaintiffs reached a settlement with the driver separately.
Tesla said at the time that it was planning to appeal the case and its first step in that respect happened today, with lawyers for Tesla, who filed a 71-page movement that put the problems they had with the trial.
In it, Tesla either requests that the previous verdict be thrown out, that the amount of injuries is reduced or removed, or that the case goes to a new trial based on what Tesla claims were several law errors in the trial.
The table of contents in Tesla’s filing establishes the company’s rough arguments for why it requests that the verdict be thrown out, with Tesla seems to throw more arguments on the wall to see what clings:
- I. Tesla has the right to judgment as a matter of law (or at least a new trial) of responsibility.
- A. The judgment is not supported by reliable expert certificates.
- B. Plaintiff’s design-defective theories fail as a legal question.
- 1. Teslas 2019 Model S was not defective.
- 2nd McGee was the only cause of the applicants’ damage.
- C. The requirement for faults for war fails as a court question.
- 1. Tesla had no duty to warn.
- 2. Tesla provided extensive warnings.
- 3. The alleged failure to warn did not cause the crash.
- D. Tesla is entitled to a new trial if the post cannot maintain the judgment of any theory on which the jury was instructed.
- II. Very judgmental evidence errors justify a new lawsuit on all questions.
- A. The wrong recording of data -related evidence condemned Tesla.
- B. The wrong recording of Elon Musk’s statement condemned Tesla.
- C. The wrong admission of various accidents that are condemned Tesla.
- III. This court should give Tesla judgment as a matter of legal injuries or at least reduce penalties significantly.
- A. Florida law prohibits the introduction of any penalties in this case.
- B. Florida Law Caps penalties of three times the compensatory damage that is actually assigned against Tesla.
- C. The clause of proper process limits penalties here to no more than the net allocation of compensatory damage.
- 1. Tesla’s behavior was not reprehensible.
- 2.
- 3. Comparable civil sanctions do not justify the cost of penalties.
- IV. This court should reduce the grossly excessive allocation of compensatory damage to a maximum of $ 69 million.
In short, Tesla accuses the driver (who was found 67% responsible) fully for the crash, says Model S and its autopilot system were advanced and not deficient because “no car in the world at that time” could have avoided the accident that it caused proper warnings, although it did not have to, this proof was wrong to treat the jury against Tesla.
After reviewing the document, Tesla’s most important claim seems to be included in the inclusion of various evidence that it says it is condemned the jury against Tesla.
In fact, the only exhibition associated with the filing is a transcript of a podcast episode in which one of the plaintiffs’ experts speaks of evidence that Tesla withheld data, as Tesla says, should have been rejection and condemned the jury against it.
The applicants repeatedly claimed that Tesla had deliberately detained or tried to delete data, which required them to bring in third -party experts to detect and examine the data.
Tesla says the only reason these arguments were brought to court was to make the jury feel that there was a cover, though Tesla claims there was no cover. By repeatedly mentioning this, Tesla says the jury had a more negative view of the company than was fair.
It also says that Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s statement about autopilot should not have been allowed and that they condemned the jury against Tesla. Tesla says the statements from Musk, shown in the trial, were irrelevant to the plaintiffs’ case, exceeded the limits that the court had established which statements would be presumed and that the concession of these statements “would write down companies from making visionary projections of expected technological breakthroughs.”
You can read the full filing here.
Update: After this story was published, the plaintiffs’ lawyers reached their own statement
“This Motion is the Latest Example of Tesla and Musk’s Complete Disregard for the Human Cost of Their Defective Technology. The Jury Heard All The Facts And Came to the Right Conclusion That This Was A Case of Shared Responsibility, But That Does Not Discount The Integral Role Autopilot and The Company’s of its capabilities played in the crash that killed naibel and permanently injured dillon.
– –Brett Schreiber from Singleton Schreiber, Main Experiment for Plaintiffs Dillon Angulo & Naibel Benavides.
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Reading through the filing is compelling at first, but remember that this is only one side of the story and Tesla is known to never have an inch in legal or reputing affairs. (Update: For a quick reaction from “the other side”, see the statement from the plaintiffs’ attorneys directly above).
When you think a little deeper, the archiving is dependent on a similar “puffery” argument that Tesla has used before. The idea here is that Musk’s statements should be ignored because, as CEO of the company, he has an incentive (and familiar trend) to exaggerate the capabilities of his vehicles.
Lawyers did not use the exact word here, but they claim that Musk’s statements are “forward” and “visionary.”
But for a guy who speaks so much that he spilled $ 44 billion on a $ 12 billion social media (twice), so he could force his words ahead of each user to deny that his words have an effect is a strange legal argument.
In fact, Tesla has a story of not performing paid advertising in traditional media and has been addicted to Musk and specifically Musk’s Twitter account to be the company’s improvised communication platform. Musk even closed the company’s public relations department instead of taking on the full burden of it yourself.
So to claim that Musk’s statements should not be allowed or that they did not set the tone of the organization, is more than slightly silly.
While Tesla and Musk indicated many times that autopilot was not full self -driving (although the function they marketed under the name, Ahem, “Fully Self -driving”), the balance of Musk’s statements describing Tesla’s functions could certainly have led to a driver to believe that the vehicles were more capable than any other vehicle on the road.
Therefore, it is strange that Tesla also claims that “no other car” could have stopped in the situation with the crash. If your business is constantly claiming that you have the best, safest, most autonomy -activated vehicle in the world (including in this filing, where it is called “technique card”), so who is interested in whether other cars could have done it or not? We’re talking about your car, nothing else.
Furthermore, Tesla said that the concession of these statements will put a cooling effect on the ability of any company to project expected breakthroughs within tech. To this I say honestly: Good. Enough with rubbish, let’s focus on reality and let’s stop apologizing lies as a corporate trait across all industries.
But this is an example of Tesla trying to have it both ways to pretend that Musk’s statements are just puffi, but also that they are important for breakthroughs and that sound -absorbing musk would hurt the business. Yes, it would probably hurt Tesla’s outreach – because Musk’s statements are about the only source of Tesla’s advertising, which is why they should be heard to determine what the public thinks of Tesla’s capabilities.
And while Tesla says cases like these would “cool” the development of security functions if the manufacturers are punished for bringing them to the market, the penalty here is not to bring the feature to the market, it is to sell the function in a way that sets public expectations too high. Other features have not received this kind of control because other features are not pumped up daily with ridiculous excessive adherence to the company’s only advertising source.
At the other points I am not a lawyer. I am not up to date on the specific limits of penalties in Florida. But on the surface, it seems fair to me that if a company was found to withhold data in an important case, after falling a settlement, that a certain level of significant punishment is fair.
After all, the detention of data is in a single non-fatal crash that wasn’t even their fault, what caused cruise to close the operations everywhere. It may have been an overreaction and would certainly be an overreaction in this case with Tesla considering the driver’s responsibility for the crash. But in this case, the damage that was done on humans (a death) was greater and the damage that Tesla is told to pay ($ 243 million) will not lead to a shutdown of the entire business. Especially considering that this is the same company that just managed to find tens of thousands of billions of dollars to give to a bad CEO.
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