Two experts on autonomous vehicle safety recently dove into legal arguments and engineering factors that shaped last week’s landmark jury decision against Tesla, at one point surfacing an important takeaway about insurance for Tesla drivers.
“Your insurance company most likely is going to ‘total loss’ this car. You want to say to your insurance company, ‘I want this car put on hold until we’ve figured out what happened,'” said Mike Nelson, a partner in the law firm Nelson Law, LLC, during a webinar Monday, advising Tesla owners who might at some point be involved in serious accident situations like George McGee, the Tesla driver in the Benavides v. Tesla case.
A Florida jury last week found that Tesla was 33% liable for an accident that killed a woman and injured her boyfriend in 2019. The two were standing next to their Chevy Tahoe when McGee’s Tesla Model S, operating in Autopilot mode, went through a T-intersection and rammed into the parked Chevy.
Related articles: Tesla Must Pay $243 Million Over Fatal Autopilot Crash
The jury verdict and award holding Tesla liable for $42.5 million in compensatory damages and $200 million in punitive damages, which came in spite of the fact McGee admitted to being distracted at the time of the accident, represent a departure from past legal challenges in which Tesla’s efforts to put the full blame on drivers in crashes won out.
During the webinar, Nelson offered his advice about preserving evidence in more typical cases where drivers fully blame their cars’ automated features for harmful consequences, in reaction to reports suggesting that in the Benavides case, Tesla had deleted some vehicle data from the moments leading up to the accident—and then denied ever having it.
Co-panelist Philip Koopman, faculty emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University, an engineer who specializes in design reviews of embedded software in self-driving cars and other products, explained how the plaintiffs’ engineering expert in the Benavides case might have unearthed the deleted information. Without direct knowledge, but basing his discussion on his own participation in similar exercises, Koopman noted that when a Tesla crashes, “it phones home after the crash and sends home some of its operating data,” transmitting information about whether Autopilot was on or off, whether the driver moved the steering wheel, whether the brakes were engaged, and other vehicle information back to Tesla, filling a massive spreadsheet. “That data gets sent via cellphone-data-link up to Tesla, and they keep it on their servers. And it’s really common in these cases for the plaintiffs to get hold of that spreadsheet and do some analysis on data,” Koopman reported.