This week, a federal court in Miami started hearing a wrongful death case involving Tesla's crash-prone Autopilot driver assistance system. It's not the first time that Tesla Autopilot has been implicated in fatal traffic crashes, but it is the first time that a federal court has heard such a case.
Until now, the most high-profile court case involving Tesla Autopilot was probably the California trial over the death of Walter Huang, who was killed in 2018 when his Tesla Model X steered itself into a concrete highway divider. Huang's family took Tesla to court in April 2024 but quickly settled with the automaker under terms that have been kept secret.
And earlier this week, Tesla settled another Autopilot lawsuit concerning the death of Jeremy Banner in 2019. In that case, the Tesla's sensors failed to recognize a tractor-trailer crossing the highway and collided with it, shearing the top off the car and killing Banner.
So far, Tesla has been unable to settle with the plaintiffs in the federal case, which also concerns a fatal crash in 2019 in Florida. In this case, in April 2019, a Tesla being driven by George McGee sped through a stop sign in the Florida Keys and struck Naibel Benavides and Dillon Angulo, who were standing near their car and stargazing. Benavides was killed, and Angulo was left with a brain injury.
"I feel like we were experimented on, and this technology was out on the road before it was safe," Angulo told an NBC interviewer in 2023.
What did the experts say?
Missy Cummings, a former fighter pilot and expert on autonomous systems, pulled few punches. Cummings, who received torrents of abuse from Tesla fans after being appointed to a senior advisor position at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in 2021, told the court that "it is my professional opinion that Tesla's Autopilot is defective because Tesla knowingly allows the car to be operated in operational domains for which it is explicitly not designed for."
Tesla's cockpit monitoring of drivers to ensure they remain alert "is simply not sufficient as keeping the driver engaged," Cummings told the court. And Tesla has a long history of "promoting the abuse and misuse of Autopilot." Cummings' testimony detailed her work at NHTSA investigating other fatal Tesla crashes, like the 2016 death of Joshua Brown, and detailed some of the interactions she and her agency had had with the car company.