Tesla spars in court over autopilot alert 2 seconds before 2019 crash

By Madlin Mekelburg

 

The final two seconds before a Tesla Model S crashed into a parked SUV took center stage Thursday in a court showdown over who’s responsible for the 2019 collision — the distracted driver or his car’s Autopilot system.

 

Tesla is seeking to show a jury that the company’s technology performed as it should and that the driver is fully to blame for running through a stop sign at a T intersection in the Florida Keys and ramming into a Chevrolet Tahoe, killing a woman who stood next to the SUV and seriously injuring her boyfriend.

 

A three-week trial in Miami federal court over a suit filed by the woman’s family and the boyfriend is putting close scrutiny on a decade-long experiment with semi-autonomous driving at Elon Musk’s electric vehicle maker. A verdict against Tesla would be a blow at a time when the company is staking its future on self-driving and pushing to launch a long-promised robotaxi business. The first few days of the trial have taken jurors deep into how the technology works and what its limitations are. 

 

The company’s lawyer, Joel Smith, pressed a key witness for the plaintiffs to agree that an audible alert 1.65 seconds before impact — when the car’s automated steering function aborted — would have been enough time for the driver to avoid or at least mitigate the accident. Smith demonstrated what the alarm sounds like for jurors to hear.

 

Data recovered from the car’s computer shows that driver George McGee was pressing the accelerator to 17 miles (27.4 kilometers) per hour over the posted speed limit, leading him to override the vehicle’s adaptive cruise control before he went off the road. He hit the brakes just .55 seconds before impact, but it remains in dispute whether he saw or heard warnings from the Model S while he was reaching to the floorboard for his dropped cell phone.

 

Safety expert Mary “Missy” Cummings, an engineering professor at George Mason University, acknowledged in her second day on the witness stand that McGee may have braked in response to the alert, but she suggested his reaction time was too slow to know for sure. 

 

Cummings, who has criticized Tesla’s technology in the past and previously served as an adviser to the National Highway Safety Administration, didn’t yield much to Smith’s questioning. 

 

At one point the lawyer highlighted past comments by Musk, in which the Tesla chief executive officer said the use of “beta” to describe the Autopilot system is meant to convey that the software is not a final product and to discourage drivers from “complacency” and taking their hands off the steering wheel.

 

“I do not have any evidence in front of me that the word ‘beta’ is trying to communicate anything to drivers,” Cummings said. “What it is trying to do, in my professional opinion, is avoid legal liability.”

 

The jury also heard Thursday from an accident reconstruction specialist, Alan Moore, who argued that if Tesla had programmed its software not to operate on roadways it wasn’t designed for — like the one on Key Largo — “this crash would not have happened.”

 

But he also testified that McGee had a history of disregarding alerts. Moore explained to jurors that Autopilot automatically disengages if a driver fails to put hands on the wheel after receiving three audible warnings.  

 

“Almost every time he commuted from his office to his condo, he would get a strikeout,” Moore said. When that happened, McGee would pull over, put the car in park, shift it back into drive and turn Autopilot back on, the witness said.

 

In his opening argument, Smith had said the data history for McGee showed that he’d safely traveled through the intersection where the crash happened almost 50 times in the same Model S.

 

“The only thing that changed was his driver behavior,” Smith told the jury. “He dropped something and was trying to pick it up.”