Tesla has been testing and rolling out its Autopilot and more advanced Full Self-Driving system, which Chief Executive Elon Musk has touted as crucial to his company's future but which has drawn regulatory and legal scrutiny.
The 2019 crash killed Lee and seriously injured his two passengers, including a then-8-year-old boy who was disembowelled, court documents show. The trial involved gruesome testimony about the passengers' injuries, and the plaintiffs asked the jury for US$400 million plus punitive damages. “The jury's prolonged deliberation suggests that the verdict still casts a shadow of uncertainty,” he said.
That case was about an accident where a Model S swerved into the curb and injured its driver, and jurors told Reuters after the verdict that they believed Tesla warned drivers about its system and driver distraction was to blame. In other lawsuits, plaintiffs have alleged Autopilot is defectively designed, leading drivers to misuse the system. The jury in Riverside, however, was only asked to evaluate whether a manufacturing defect impacted the steering.Tesla shares closed up 1.76 per cent after rising more than 2 per cent.
On the stand, Tesla engineer Eloy Rubio Blanco rejected a plaintiff lawyer's suggestion that the company named its driver-assistant feature “Full Self-Driving” because it wanted people to believe that its systems had more abilities than was really the case.