Tesla wins lawsuit over Autopilot Model S crash

This week, Tesla defeated a lawsuit that blamed the company’s Autopilot for a 2019 crash, reports . On Friday, a jury in the state of California found that driver assistance software was not to blame in a Model S crash that left the driver of the vehicle with a broken jaw, missing teeth and nerve damage. Justine Hsu sued Tesla in 2020 after her electric car veered into a center line on a Los Angeles city street while Autopilot was engaged. She sought more than $3 million in damages, alleging defects in the software and design of Tesla̵[ads1]7;s airbags.

Tesla denied responsibility for the accident. It claimed that Hsu was using autopilot on a city street, a practice the company warns against in the software’s user manual. The jury awarded Hsu no damages, saying the automaker did not willfully fail to disclose facts about Autopilot. As Reuters notes, the trial is believed to be among the first to involve driver assistance mode. Although the result will not be “legally binding in other cases”, it is expected to inform how lawyers deal with future incidents involving the technology.

The outcome of the case is unlikely to ease the investigation Tesla is already facing related to its claims surrounding Autopilot and “Full Self-Driving” software. At the beginning of the year, the car manufacturer confirmed that the US Department of Justice had linked the two functions. The company is also under investigation by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for autopilot collisions involving .