Tesla asked a judge to nix the $ 243 million verdict filed against the company in a lawsuit involving the automatic pilot system or to allow a new trial to occur, according to a new court registration.
The company’s lawyers argue that the verdict, which a jury made earlier this month, “flies in front of the basic law on Florida’s delinquency, the fair procedure clause and common sense”. This latest deposit by lawyers Tesla is trying, once again, to rest all responsibility to the George McGee driver, who has helped to cause a crash.
The jury eventually decided that the driver deserved two -thirds of responsibility and attributed one third to Tesla.
The high profile case focused around 2019 crash in Florida. McGee was driving a Tesla model at night and using the company’s automatic pilot’s help system-which is a less capable system than the most fully characterized “full self-guiding software”. Both systems require the driver to hold his hands on the steering wheel.
As a vertically parked SUV approached, neither the McGee nor the automatic pilot system applied the brakes. McGee’s car broke a sign of stops and hit the SUV, killing 20 -year -old Naibel Benavides Leon and seriously injuring her friend Dillon Angulo.
McGee was accused separately and settled with the victims. This week we learned that Tesla rejected a $ 60 million settlement offer from the victims a few months before the verdict.
Tesla’s lawyers argue in the new testimony that the law on the responsibility of the products is supposed to punish manufacturers whose cars “perform in ways that are dangerously defying the expectations of ordinary consumers or are unjustifiably dangerous”.
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“This is not the case – not in the slightest,” they wrote. They say that McGee’s “excellent reckless” was to blame as he arrived on his phone when the crash happened – a fact that admitted in his case.
By allowing the verdict to stand, they argue, “prevent innovation, confuse consumer expectations, and lead manufacturers to abandon security improvements for fear of having severe punishments when a driver abuses their product.”
Tesla’s lawyers also take footage on opposing lawyers in the testimony, arguing that “they are shocking this jury with a flood of highly biased but irrelevant evidence – regarding data maintenance, Elon Musk and unfortunate accidents”.
“The plaintiff’s adviser ensured that this trial never concerned Tesla 2019 or the accident caused by McGee’s reckless driving,” they wrote.
Brett Schreiber, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said in an email “The proposal is the last example of Tesla’s full violation of the human cost of their defective technology”.
“The jury heard all the events and concluded the right conclusion that this was a case of common responsibility, but this does not reduce the integral role of automatic pilot and false statements by the company of its capabilities that played in the crash that killed Naibel and was injured.” “We are sure that the court will support this verdict, which does not serve as an indictment of the autonomous vehicle industry, but of reckless and unsafe growth and development of the automatic pilot system.”
The article was informed to include a statement by Brett Schreiber, a lawyer for the plaintiffs.
