Tesla has won a legal victory after a California jury found the automaker was not to blame for a 2019 crash involving its Autopilot advanced driver assistance system.
The plaintiff, Los Angeles resident Justine Hsu, had sued Tesla last year, alleging negligence, fraud and breach of contract, after her Tesla Model S hit a median on a city street while Autopilot was engaged. The airbags deployed, fracturing Hsu’s jaw and causing nerve damage. Hsu was seeking damages from Tesla, but the jury awarded no damages in the case.
This appears to be the first case involving Autopilot to go to trial. The court found that Tesla was not to blame for the crash and that the airbag deployed as it should have. Furthermore, the court noted that Tesla had properly warned users not to use the system while driving on city streets, which Hsu did.
The verdict is a win for Tesla as it faces increased regulatory scrutiny over Autopilot, as well as the enhanced versions of the system called Enhanced Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) software. Tesla vehicles come with a driver assistance system called Autopilot as standard, and for a $6,000 upgrade, owners can purchase Enhanced Autopilot with several other features.
For an additional $15,000, owners can buy FSD, which CEO Elon Musk has promised will one day deliver full autonomous driving capabilities. However, Tesla vehicles are not yet self-driving, and FSD still requires the driver to be ready to take control at all times. The FSD feature includes several automated driving features such as Summon and Navigate on Autopilot.
The latter is an active guidance system that can navigate a car from a highway on-ramp to off-ramp, including interchanges and making lane changes. It is also supposed to handle steering on city streets and recognize and react to traffic lights and stop signs.
In February, Tesla paused the rollout of its Full Self-Driving beta software in the United States and Canada following a recall of the system that federal safety regulators warned could allow vehicles to act unsafely around intersections and cause crashes.
