The Tesla Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) lawsuit floodgates are open. We are now starting to see trials and settlements arising from crashes that occurred in 2018-2019 as they work through the legal process.
Crashes involving Tesla’s ADAS systems have increased significantly since then, and we expect legal actions to escalate following the groundbreaking defeat of Tesla’s primary defense in a trial in Florida.
The lawyer who beat Tesla in this case is already going for a Round 2.
As we previously reported, a jury in Florida has assigned 33% of the responsibility for a fatal crash involving Autopilot, Tesla’s level 2 advanced driver assistance system (ADAS), to Tesla and awarded the plaintiffs, the family of the victim and the survivor of the crash, $243 million.
Tesla is expected to appeal the verdict, but it is still a groundbreaking case that highlights a trend in the legal actions against Tesla over crashes involving its ADAS systems (Autopilot and Full Self-Driving/FSD).
Over the last few years, Tesla has been able to dismiss those concerns as it hides behind warnings to pay attention and disclosures stating that the drivers are always the ones responsible in the event of an accident.
In short, Tesla has always claimed that it bears no responsibility if drivers abuse its ADAS systems.
However, things have been changing over the last year.
Tesla recently settled a wrongful death lawsuit involving a crash on Autopilot that happened in 2018, and now, it has lost a trial over a crash that happened in 2019.
In the trial, the plaintiffs managed to get around Tesla putting all the blame on the driver and show the jury that its marketing and deployment of Autopilot contributed to drivers misusing a system that fails to perform as advertised.
We already reported, based on the transcripts of the trial, that Tesla misled the police and the plaintiffs, a family trying to understand all the factors that led to their daughter’s death, in trying to retrieve critical Autopilot data that helped better understand the crash.
Next, the evidence in the case is going to be made public, except for some redactions from Tesla, which is likely going to be of interest in dozens of other legal cases involving Tesla’s ADAS systems.
In an interview with The Verge, Brett Schreiber, the lead attorney in the Florida case, revealed that he is also leading another wrongful death case against Tesla, Maldonado v. Tesla, currently pending in the Alameda State Superior Court, which is expected to commence by the end of the year.
In this case, a Tesla vehicle on Autopilot 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.
This crash also occurred in 2019, but it is only now being brought to trial. The legal process takes time, and we are only now beginning to see the legal repercussions of crashes involving Tesla Autopilot, as well as Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system.
With more vehicles in the Tesla fleet and more mileage using ADAS features, crashes involving those features increased significantly between 2020-2025. This means more legal trouble for Tesla.
Schreiber claims to have an even stronger case with Maldonado v. Tesla. In the Benavides case in Florida, the “Autopilot defect” part of the case was more about the fact that the driver shouldn’t have been able to use the system on non-highway roads.
In the Maldonado case, the crash occurred on the highway, where Autopilot is intended to be used, but it didn’t stop for the pickup truck in front of it.
The facts are a stubborn thing. And we get to tell those same facts with a better Autopilot defect theory. And I get to not only juxtapose Musk’s lies in that case, but I juxtapose them with the testimony that I didn’t have in Miami. I’ve only had this case for a year. I worked the Maldonado case from the beginning. And in that case, I have testimony from all of the senior Autopilot leadership: Sterling Anderson, CJ Moore, Andrej Karpathy. And I show them those same quotes that were played to that jury in Miami. I said, “When Mr. Musk said those things, was that a true statement about production vehicles at Tesla?” To a person, they answer: Absolutely not.
Schreiber claims to have testimonies from Tesla Autopilot executives and engineers around the time of the crash that contradict what CEO Elon Musk was saying to the public about Autopilot.
Once these testimonies are entered as evidence, they could have important implications for dozens of other cases involving Autopilot.
Electrek’s Take
Obviously, avoiding loss of lives should be a priority, but I think it’s clear that Tesla doesn’t care at this point. But even from a business standpoint, it doesn’t make sense.
One of my foremost criticisms of Tesla’s self-driving efforts from a business standpoint is that they are a bigger liability than a value creator.
Tesla has clearly misled the public for years, leading them to believe that Autopilot and FSD are more than they are: level 2 driver assistance systems.
Schreiber explained it well here:
[…] there are two Teslas. There’s Tesla in the showroom and then there’s Tesla in the courtroom. And Tesla in the showroom tells you that they’ve invented the greatest full self-driving car the world has ever seen. Mr. Musk has been peddling to consumers and investors for more than a decade that the cars are fully self-driving, that the hardware is capable of full autonomy. And those statements were as untrue the day he said them as they remain untrue today. But then they showed up in a courtroom and they say, No, no, no, this is nothing but a driver assistance feature.
This creates a significant liability in accidents involving people who believed Tesla’s misrepresentation. However, it also poses a substantial liability to claim that their cars have “all the hardware necessary for unsupervised self-driving” when that is not true.
We are likely talking about tens of billions of dollars worth of liability.
From a purely business standpoint, it might have made sense if Tesla had been first in autonomy and taken a large part of the market, but it’s not what’s happening.
Tesla is still far from achieving unsupervised self-driving at scale, while this liability is still building up.
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