With regard to Tesla, its autopilot operating system, and a number of fatal crashes, including one peculiar high-speed collision that tragically claimed the life of an 18-year-old teen boy, Elon Musk now faces significant liability. A lawsuit stemming from that incident is currently going to trial in South Florida.
The lawsuit’s target Tesla reached 116 mph before veering off the road and into a wall. The boy’s father purchased the Tesla with a speed limiter to prevent the car from going faster than 85 miles per hour, yet the tragedy still happened. Bloomberg reports that the trial’s evidence strongly implies that Tesla removed the limiter without the father’s consent or even notifying the father, who was the car’s owner and specifically requested the limiter.
Elon Musk apologized to the father of the teen who died in a Tesla Model S collision for removing the vehicle’s speed limiter without his consent, the family’s attorney testified in court.
The lawyer, Curtis Miner, testified in front of a jury on Thursday that the billionaire CEO of Tesla Inc. made a “critical confession” when James Riley called him in May 2018 and inquired about how a device meant to keep the car from exceeding 85 mph was removed before 18-year-old Barrett Riley veered off a Florida road at 116 mph and collided with a wall.
According to the article, Musk told the lawyer, “Well, I guess we shouldn’t have taken that off,” and he pledged to look into Tesla’s corporate policies. The company might suffer a great deal as a result of the admission. If the Florida jury decides Tesla was at fault for the collision, it can undoubtedly punish the company severely. Though no jury will be required to reach the same conclusion, in the overall scheme of things, Tesla is currently facing a barrage of lawsuits resulting from fatalities brought on by the autopilot system itself, and Musk’s admission that policies needed to be reviewed could play a role in each trial:
The most valuable automaker in the world is facing its first negligence lawsuit following a fatal collision involving one of its vehicles. The manufacturer of electric vehicles is dealing with a barrage of lawsuits over accidents that have been linked to its Autopilot driver-assistance feature, which has come under increased scrutiny from safety authorities.
It doesn’t sound like Tesla has that proof, which naturally begs the question, “Then why do they allow autopilot?” If you’re going to have autopilot, you better have statistics to show that more people die driving their own cars than die in crashes on autopilot.
This could significantly decrease the price of Tesla stock. Musk’s wealth primarily consists of Tesla stock, and Musk’s Twitter tryst has already severely impacted the stock price. Musk could lose up to two-thirds of his wealth over the course of a year with one more crushing blow, and that’s without accounting for the harm he’ll suffer from the legal snarl surrounding his nearly-dead Twitter offer.
It is challenging to name someone whose status and wealth fell more precipitously than Musk’s over the past year. The outcome of this trial and the jury’s specific conclusions will have a significant impact on Tesla’s value going forward.
A day without learning, in the opinion of Jason Miciak, is a day not lived. He is an attorney, author, political writer, and features writer. He is a dual citizen who was born in Canada and spent his adolescence and college years there. Since then, he has lived in seven states. He now enjoys being a single father to a young girl and writes from the Gulf Coast beaches. He enjoys making his own flower pots, cooking, and studying non-mathematical aspects of quantum mechanics and cosmology as well as scientific philosophy and religion. For speaking engagements or any other issues, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
