The lawsuit was brought by the estate of Micah Lee, a 37-year-old man who was killed in a crash in California in 2019, and two of his passengers who were injured in the crash. They argued that the car’s FSD system had malfunctioned, causing the car to veer off the highway east of Los Angeles, strike a tree at 65 miles per hour, and burst into flames. Tesla, they claimed, had known the FSD system was faulty when it sold Lee the Tesla Model 3.
Jonathan Michaels, an attorney for the plaintiffs, argued during the case that the FSD system was “experimental” because it was in “beta,” and thus not yet ready for release.
"A car company should never sell consumers experimental vehicles," Michaels said.
However, nine of the 12 jurors in the civil case decided in favor of Tesla, which argued that it was unclear if the FSD system was actually engaged at the time of the crash, had no demonstrable malfunctions, and that Lee had been drunk at the time of the crash.
The company claims it properly alerts its drivers that despite being called full self-driving and an autopilot, the systems still require human monitoring and aren’t totally hands-off.
Self-driving technology has been slowly making its way onto American roads, with seven US states no longer requiring human drivers to be behind the wheel of cars being legally operated on their roads. The laborious process of teaching AI to safely operate cars, and especially to respect pedestrians and to react to sudden emergencies such as a child running into the road, have stirred controversy, especially amid several deaths caused by collisions with self-driving cars.
In February, Tesla issued a massive recall of 350,000 vehicles because they could cause vehicle crashes by allowing vehicles to “act unsafe around intersections.”
A report published by a major US newspaper earlier this year found a direct correlation between the increase in the number of Tesla-made cars on US roads and an increase in the number of automobile-related deaths linked to self-driving mode.
Tesla Model Y SUVs and Model 3 sedans are the two most common electric vehicles on US roads, of which the Biden administration estimates there to be some 3 million in total. According to US government data, 11 people were killed in car crashes involving autonomous vehicles in a four-month period last year, 10 of which were Teslas.