SAN JOSE, Calif. (Legal Newsline) – Tesla says its Autopilot system is not to blame for a fatal crash in which a driver sped up to more than 100 mph before colliding with a truck.
The company is fighting to keep its materials on its cars’ Autopilot feature away from the children of a couple who died in a Tesla Model 3 who sued the company in May in Santa Clara Superior Court.
The suit claims the Autopilot system lacked adequate crash avoidance. David and Sheila Brown died on Aug. 12, 2020, in the accident.
Disputes have arisen during discovery. Tesla says its Autopilot documents shouldn’t be turned over because the National Transportation Safety Board ruled Autopilot did not cause the accident.
The company has moved for a protective order on those documents.
“After parking on the freeway shoulder for a few minutes, the driver engaged Autopilot and then proceeded to continuously press the accelerator pedal controlling the vehicle’s speed; thus, the driver overrode whatever speed control Autopilot was providing,” Tesla’s lawyers at Buchalter wrote on March 11.
“Because the driver’s hands were not detected on the steering wheel, the system appropriately published alerts to him to put his hands on the wheel, and when he did not, Autopilot ‘struck out,’ meaning Autopilot turned off and could not be turned back on for the rest of the drive cycle.
“The strike out triggered a pop-up instruction to ‘Take Over Immediately;’ this was 12 seconds before the first rear-end impact on the freeway.”
After that impact, David Brown hit the accelerator and steered off the freeway without braking, Tesla says. He was travelling 114 mph when he crashed into a pickup truck at the end of an off-ramp, 17 seconds after Autopilot struck out.
“None of this has anything to do with Autopilot, as Autopilot was disengaged,” Tesla says. “Autopilot does not function at over 90 mph, it was not active or engaged here, even when Autopilot was engaged the driver overrode it by pressing the accelerator pedal, and the reason the crash happened is because the driver accelerated and steered and caused the crash.”
Tesla also doesn’t want Autopilot materials it shares with the plaintiffs to be available to lawyers in litigation involving its other models. Instead, the sharing provision should be limited to motor control system information on Model 3s, it says.