LoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyOn a Texas evening last week, a 76-year-old grandmother named Martha Avila was standing in the front room of her suburban home when a Tesla Model 3 hurtled into her brick home at a reported speed of over 70 miles per hour, killing her.
The car’s driver, 44-year-old Michael Butler, later told police that he had Tesla’s driver assistance features—which the automaker argues make driving safer and less stressful—engaged during the crash. Butler exhibited “no signs of intoxication,” the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, which responded to the crash, noted in a report.
Now Avila’s family is suing not only Butler but also Tesla, alleging that the electric automaker's Full Self-Driving (Supervised) driver assistance feature, also called FSD, played a role in her death. The feature is designed to handle certain aspects of driving—including navigating city and residential roads, 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 suit alleges Tesla’s tech “was defective in design and unreasonably dangerous,” lawyers representing Avila’s daughter and son-in-law wrote in a lawsuit filed in Harris County District Court on Tuesday. (The son-in-law, Justin Barbour, was also in the home and injured in the crash.)
Tesla didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for comment. But on X, Tesla Vice President of AI Software Ashok Elluswamy wrote that Tesla data showed that Butler “manually overrode self-driving by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100 percent” and “had the accelerator pressed even after the crash.” Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted that speculation that the company’s technology played a role in the crash “makes no sense.”
Plenty of the crash’s specifics have yet to come out, and it’s very possible the Tesla’s tech didn’t have anything to do with Avila’s death. But even if the driver is mostly responsible for what happened, the electric automaker could still be found at least partially culpable—and liable for big monetary damages.
“If the product is designed in a way that it leaves drivers vulnerable to situations where suddenly the system is not working and they’ve lost situational awareness, Tesla could be found responsible,” says Matthew Wansley, a professor with Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law who studies automotive tech.
In fact, it’s happened before. Last year, a Florida jury found that the driver of a Tesla Model S using Autopilot, Tesla’s earlier driver assistance software, was mostly responsible for a crash in which he failed to see that the T-shaped intersection his car was traveling on was ending. He kept his foot on the accelerator, and the Tesla collided with and killed 22-year-old Naibel Benavides Leon. Her boyfriend, 26-year-old Dillon Angulo, was seriously injured. (Despite often touting its vehicles’ expansive data collection efforts, Tesla said it wasn’t able to recover critical data related to the case; Benavides’ family lawyers were later able to recover it with help from a hacker.)
But the jury also found, in a precedent-breaking decision, that Tesla shared one-third responsibility for the crash because it believed Autopilot was effective. It determined that Tesla was liable for $200 million in punitive damages, plus an additional $43 million in compensatory damages. A judge upheld the verdict earlier this year.
Critics of Tesla’s approach argue that it’s precisely because FSD is pretty great that the feature presents a problem. If drivers trust that the system operates well all the time, they might not be prepared to take over if something goes wrong. In a 2018 California highway crash, the driver behind the wheel of a Model X using Autopilot failed to take over steering before the vehicle crashed into a barrier, killing him. (Tesla later settled a lawsuit related to the crash hours before it was set to begin.)
An ongoing probe conducted by the National Traffic Safety Administration's Office of Defects opened last fall also gets at this potential issue. The investigation was triggered by more than 40 reported incidents in which FSD failed to adhere to traffic laws, including one crash caused by a Tesla with the feature engaged running a red light. The review, the agency wrote in a filing, will assess whether the feature gives users “prior warning or adequate time for the driver to respond to the unexpected behavior or to safely supervise” the tech.
NHTSA compelled Tesla to issue an Autopilot-related recall in 2023 after a two-year investigation suggested the system encouraged driver inattention. The recall was issued as an over-the-air software update.
More is expected to come on the Texas crash, even if the lawsuit doesn’t make it to the open litigation stage. At least two federal agencies are investigating. The National Transportation Safety Board, an independent federal agency that investigates notable transportation incidents, said Wednesday that it had opened a joint probe with the Harris County Sheriff’s Office into the crash. (Peter Knudson, a spokesperson for the agency, couldn’t say whether it had received additional information or data from Tesla before opening the investigation, but said that the NTSB typically receives “very general information about the circumstances of the accident in order to make the decision whether or not to investigate.”)
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the nation’s top road safety regulator, confirmed this week that it had also opened an investigation into the crash.
In a statement, Ryan Zehl, a lawyer representing Martha Avila’s family in the Texas crash lawsuit, said her family was “understandably devastated.”
“We are committed to determining exactly what happened to prevent similar tragedies from occurring in the future,” he said.
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