A judge has found “reasonable evidence” that Elon Musk and other executives at Tesla knew that the company’s self-driving technology was defective but still allowed the cars to be driven in an unsafe manner anyway, according to a recent ruling issued in Florida.
Palm Beach county circuit court judge Reid Scott said he had found evidence that Tesla “engaged in a marketing strategy that painted the products as autonomous” and that Musk’s public statements about the technology “had a significant effect on the belief about the capabilities of the products”.
The ruling, reported by Reuters on Wednesday, clears the way for a lawsuit over a fatal crash in 2019 north of Miami involving a Tesla Model 3. The vehicle crashed into an 18-wheeler truck that had turned on to the road into the path of driver Stephen Banner, shearing off the Tesla’s roof and killing Banner.
Autonomous vehicles ten years ago: Human drivers are slow and prone to lapses in judgement
Autonomous vehicles today: Elon musk, a guy who famously destroyed a rare vehicle like a dumbass, will be training the AI that drives you around. It won't know how to respond to an event not encountered in the training data and it will occasionally run into an ambulance
And his employees hate him so much I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a patch released that makes one sustained fart noise when airbags deploy.