A fatal Tesla crash in Texas has led to a legal showdown

On the state of Texas Last week evening, a 76-year-old grandmother named Martha Avila was standing in the front room of her suburban home when Tesla The Model 3 plowed into her brick home at more than 70 mph, killing her.

The driver of the car, 44-year-old Michael Butler, later told police he had done so Tesla driver assistance features— which the automaker says makes driving safer and less stressful — are activated during an accident. The Harris County Sheriff’s Office, which responded to the incident, noted in a report that Butler showed no signs of intoxication.

Now Avila’s family is suing not only Butler but also Tesla, alleging that the electric automaker’s Full Self-Driving (supervised) driver-assistance feature, also called FSD, played a role in her death. The feature is designed to handle certain aspects of driving — including navigating city and residential roads, stopping at red lights and stop signs, and changing lanes — but it requires drivers to pay attention and be ready to intervene if the system makes an error. The suit alleges that Tesla’s technology was “flawed by design and unreasonably dangerous,” attorneys representing Avila’s daughter and son-in-law wrote in a lawsuit filed in Harris County District Court on Tuesday. (His brother-in-law Justin Barbour was also at the home and was injured in the accident.)

Tesla did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment. But on the X, Tesla’s Vice President of AI Software, Ashok Elswami books That Tesla data showed Butler “manually overridden Autopilot by holding the accelerator pedal up to 100 percent” and “the accelerator was depressed even after the collision.” Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted that speculation that the company’s technology played a role in the accident is “nonsensical.”

Many details of the accident have not yet been revealed, and it is very likely that Tesla’s technology had nothing to do with Avila’s death. But even if the driver is primarily responsible for what happened, the electric car maker could still be found at least partially culpable — and liable for significant financial damages.

“If the product is designed in a way that makes drivers vulnerable to situations where the system suddenly doesn’t work and they lose situational awareness, Tesla could be held liable,” says Matthew Wansley, a professor at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law who studies automotive technology.

In fact, it’s happened before. Last year, a Florida jury found that the driver of a Tesla Model S used Autopilot, Tesla’s previous driver-assistance program, He was mostly in charge Due to an accident in which he failed to see that the T-shaped intersection his car was traveling through had ended. He kept his foot on the accelerator, and the Tesla struck and killed 22-year-old Nibel Benavides Leon. Her boyfriend, 26-year-old Dillon Angulo, was seriously injured. (Despite touting expanded data collection efforts for its vehicles, Tesla said it was unable to recover critical data related to the case; lawyers for the Benavides family were later able to recover it With the help of a pirate.)

But the jury also found, in an unprecedented decision, that Tesla shared a third of liability for the crash because it believed Autopilot was effective. It decided that Tesla was liable for punitive damages worth $200 million, plus an additional $43 million in compensatory damages. A judge upheld the ruling earlier this year.

Critics of Tesla’s approach argue that the feature is a problem precisely because the FSD is so great. If drivers trust that the system works well all the time, they may not be willing to take over if something goes wrong. In a 2018 California highway crash, a driver driving a Model (Tesla He later settled a lawsuit relating to downtime hours before they are set to start.)