After a lengthy trial, a Florida jury on Tuesday announced its decision on the lawsuit brought by a father whose then 18-year-old son died with a friend in a Tesla Model S accident in May 2018. As US media reported, she awarded the parents $ 10.5 million in damages. They had blamed Tesla for their son’s death because the company had disabled a previously installed speed limiter; In addition, a design flaw in the battery is said to have contributed to the electric car bursting into flames after the accident. But the jury has now ruled that Tesla was only 1 percent responsible for the teenager’s death.
Tesla introduced new feature after accident
The accident in May 2018 killed the Tesla owner’s son, who was behind the wheel, as well as a friend of the same age, and another survived. Before he was stopped by a wall, he was driving at 187 km/h through a curve in a residential area with a speed limit of 40 km/h. Shortly thereafter, the car burst into flames, which the father attributed to a design flaw in the battery system in his 2019 lawsuit. A judge had already rejected this point at the end of June, reports the agency Reuters.
So the jury in Florida should only decide on the second accusation: because his son had previously been caught significantly exceeding the speed limit in the Model S, Tesla’s father had installed a speed-limiting device in it, which the later fatality wears secretly deactivated again at another location. As the owner, Tesla should have asked him beforehand, the plaintiff argued. But the jury now found that the company was only 1 percent to blame for the fatal accident. In their eyes, the father was responsible for 9 percent, and the son bore the majority of the blame at 90 percent.
The case is well known, among other things, because Tesla responded with a software update. A month after the death of the two teenagers in Florida, the 2018.24 v version with the new Speed Limit Mode function was distributed, which allows you to set a PIN-secured maximum speed for your own electric car. “In Memory of Barrett Riley,” Tesla wrote under the release notes, making it clear what the motivation for this update was: The name is that of the young man who drove the Model S.
According to his father, CEO Musk has admitted to making mistakes
According to one Bloomberg report the plaintiff father testified in the process that he received an email from Elon Musk a few days after the accident and later a phone call. In the phone call, the Tesla boss admitted that it was a mistake to deactivate the speed limiter without asking. However, his lawyers disputed this account in court. The plaintiffs’ representatives were pleased that the jury had also found negligence on Tesla’s side. She hopes that the case has at least prevented further accidents and saved lives by introducing the software function for speed limitation.
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