Lawyers for Tesla filed a motion asking a court to throw out a recent $243 million verdict against the company related to a fatal crash in Florida in 2019. The case is the first instance of Tesla being ruled against by a court in an Autopilot liability case – previous cases had ended up settled out of court.
To catch up, the case in question is the $243 million Autopilot wrongful death case which concluded early this month. It was the first actual trial verdict against the company in an Autopilot wrongful death case – not counting previous out-of-court settlements.
The case centered around a 2019 crash of a Model S in Florida, where the driver dropped his phone and while he was picking it up, the Model S drove through a stop sign at a T-intersection, crashing into a parked Chevy Tahoe which then struck two pedestrians, killing one and seriously injuring the other.
Tesla was also caught withholding data in the case, which is not a good look.
In the end, for the purposes of compensatory damages, the driver was found 67% responsible and Tesla was found 33% responsible. But Tesla was also slapped with $200 million in punitive damages. The plaintiffs reached a settlement with the driver separately.
Tesla said at the time that it planned to appeal the case, and its first move in that respect happened today, with lawyers for Tesla filing a 71-page motion laying out the problems they had with the trial.
In it, Tesla requests either that the previous verdict be thrown out, that the amount of damages be reduced or eliminated, or that the case go to a new trial, based on what Tesla contends were numerous errors of law during the trial.
The table of contents of Tesla’s filing lays out the company’s rough arguments for why it’s requesting the verdict to be thrown out, with Tesla seeming to throw several arguments at the wall to see what sticks:
- I. Tesla Is Entitled to Judgment as a Matter of Law (or at Least a New Trial) on Liability.
- A. The Verdict Is Unsupported by Reliable Expert Evidence.
- B. Plaintiffs’ Design-Defect Theories Fail as a Matter of Law.
- 1. Tesla’s 2019 Model S Was Not Defective.
- 2. McGee Was the Sole Cause of Plaintiffs’ Injuries.
- C. The Failure-to-Warn Claim Fails as a Matter of Law.
- 1. Tesla Had No Duty to Warn.
- 2. Tesla Provided Extensive Warnings.
- 3. The Asserted Failure to Warn Didn’t Cause the Crash.
- D. Tesla Is Entitled to a New Trial If the Record Cannot Sustain the Verdict as to Any Theory on Which the Jury Was Instructed.
- II. Highly Prejudicial Evidentiary Errors Warrant a New Trial on All Issues.
- A. The Improper Admission of Data-Related Evidence Prejudiced Tesla.
- B. The Improper Admission of Elon Musk’s Statements Prejudiced Tesla.
- C. The Improper Admission of Dissimilar Accidents Prejudiced Tesla.
- III. This Court Should Grant Tesla Judgment as a Matter of Law on Punitive Damages or at Least Significantly Reduce Punitive Damages.
- A. Florida Law Prohibits the Imposition of Any Punitive Damages in This Case.
- B. Florida Law Caps Punitive Damages at Three Times the Compensatory Damages Actually Awarded Against Tesla.
- C. The Due Process Clause Limits Punitive Damages Here to No More Than the Net Award of Compensatory Damages.
- 1. Tesla’s Conduct Was Not Reprehensible.
- 2. A Substantial Disparity Exists Between the $200 Million Award of Punitive Damages and the $42.3 Million Award of Compensatory Damages.
- 3. Comparable Civil Penalties Do Not Justify the Punitive-Damages Award.
- IV. This Court Should Reduce the Grossly Excessive Award of Compensatory Damages to No More Than $69 Million.
In short, Tesla blames the driver (who was found 67% liable) fully for the crash, says that the Model S and its Autopilot system were state-of-the-art and not defective because “no car in the world at the time” could have avoided the accident, that it provided proper warnings even though it didn’t need to, that evidence was improperly admitted to prejudice the jury against Tesla, and that the punitive damages are excessive.
After looking through the document, Tesla’s main contention seems to be with the admission of various evidence that it says prejudiced the jury against Tesla.
Indeed, the only exhibit attached to the filing is a transcript of a podcast episode where one of plaintiffs’ experts talks about evidence that Tesla withheld data, which Tesla says should have been inadmissible and prejudiced the jury against it.
The plaintiffs repeatedly asserted that Tesla had deliberately withheld or tried to delete data, which required them to bring in third party experts to discover and examine the data.
Tesla says that the only reason these arguments were brought into court was to make the jury feel like there was a coverup, even though Tesla claims that there was no coverup. By repeatedly mentioning this, Tesla says the jury had a more negative view of the company than was fair.
It also says that Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s statements about Autopilot shouldn’t have been admissible, and that they prejudiced the jury against Tesla. Tesla says that the statements by Musk shown at the trial were irrelevant to plaintiffs’ case, exceeded the limits the court had set on which statements would be admissible, and that the admission of these statements “would disincentivize companies from making visionary projections about anticipated technological breakthroughs.”
You can read through the full filing here.
Update: After this story was published, plaintiffs’ attorneys reached out with their own statement
“This motion is the latest example of Tesla and Musk’s complete disregard for the human cost of their defective technology. The jury heard all the facts and came to the right conclusion that this was a case of shared responsibility, but that does not discount the integral role Autopilot and the company’s misrepresentations of its capabilities played in the crash that killed Naibel and permanently injured Dillon. We are confident the court will uphold this verdict, which serves not as an indictment of the autonomous vehicle industry, but of Tesla’s reckless and unsafe development and deployment of its Autopilot system.”
–Brett Schreiber of Singleton Schreiber, lead trial counsel for plaintiffs Dillon Angulo & Naibel Benavides.
Author: Jameson Dow
Source: Electrek
Reviewed By: Editorial Team
