In Texas one evening last week, a 76-year-old grandmother named Martha Avila was standing in front of her house when a Tesla Model 3 smashed into her brick home at a reported speed of more than 70 miles per hour, killing her.
The driver of the car, Michael Butler, 44, later told police that he had items to help the Tesla driver—the automaker says it makes driving safer and less stressful—who were involved in the crash. Butler did not show “signs of intoxication,” the County Sheriff’s Office, which responded to the crash, noted in the report.
Now Avila’s family is suing not only Butler but also Tesla, alleging that the driver’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) driver assistance feature, also called FSD, played a role in his death. The feature is designed to handle certain aspects of driving—including navigating city and residential streets, stopping for red lights and stop signs, and changing lanes—but requires drivers to pay attention and stay ready to intervene if the system makes a mistake. The lawsuit alleges that Tesla’s technology was “defective in design and unreasonably dangerous,” attorneys representing Avila’s daughter and son-in-law wrote in a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Harris County District Court. (The son-in-law, Justin Barbour, was also at home and was injured in the accident.)
Tesla did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment. But with X, vice president of AI software Ashok Elluswamy wrote that Tesla’s data showed that Butler “was able to overdrive himself by pressing the accelerator up to 100 percent” and “the accelerator was pressed even after the accident.” Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that speculation that the company’s technology played a role in the crash is “absurd.”
Most of the details of the crash have not come out, and it is possible that Tesla’s technology had nothing to do with Avila’s death. But even if the driver is responsible for what happened, the electric car maker could still be found at least partly to blame—and liable for substantial monetary damages.
“If the product is designed in a way that leaves drivers vulnerable to situations where the system suddenly malfunctions and they lose awareness of the situation, Tesla could be found guilty,” said Matthew Wansley, a professor at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law who studies automotive technology.
In fact, it has happened before. Last year, a Florida jury found that the driver of a Tesla Model S using Autopilot, Tesla’s advanced driver assistance software, was at fault for a crash in which he failed to see the T-shaped road his car was traveling on. He kept his foot on the accelerator, and the Tesla crashed and killed 22-year-old Naibel Benavides Leon. Her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo, 26, was seriously injured. (Despite often touting its automotive data-gathering skills, Tesla said it could not obtain sensitive information related to the case; lawyers for the Benavides family were later able to obtain it with the help of a hacker.)
But the jury also found, in a negative decision, that Tesla shared one-third liability for the accident because it believed Autopilot was working properly. It ruled that Tesla will be charged $200 million in compensatory damages, and another $43 million in compensatory damages. The judge approved the decision earlier this year.
Critics of Tesla’s approach argue that it is because the FSD is so good that the feature presents a problem. If drivers trust the system to work well all the time, they may not be ready to take over if something goes wrong. In a 2018 California highway crash, the driver of a Model X using Autopilot failed to take over the steering wheel before the car hit a curb, killing him. (Tesla later settled a lawsuit related to the crash hours before it began.)
