Lawyers for Tesla filed a motion asking a court to throw out a recent $243 million verdict against the company related to a fatal crash in Florida in 2019. The case is the first instance of Tesla being ruled against by a court in an Autopilot liability case – previous cases had ended up settled out of court.

To catch up, the case in question is the $243 million Autopilot wrongful death case which concluded early this month. It was the first actual trial verdict against the company in an Autopilot wrongful death case – not counting previous out-of-court settlements.

The case centered around a 2019 crash of a Model S in Florida, where the driver dropped his phone and while he was picking it up, the Model S drove through a stop sign at a T-intersection, crashing into a parked Chevy Tahoe which then struck two pedestrians, killing one and seriously injuring the other.

Tesla was also caught withholding data in the case, which is not a good look.

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In the end, for the purposes of compensatory damages, the driver was found 67% responsible and Tesla was found 33% responsible. But Tesla was also slapped with $200 million in punitive damages. The plaintiffs reached a settlement with the driver separately.

Tesla said at the time that it planned to appeal the case, and its first move in that respect happened today, with lawyers for Tesla filing a 71-page motion laying out the problems they had with the trial.

In it, Tesla requests either that the previous verdict be thrown out, that the amount of damages be reduced or eliminated, or that the case go to a new trial, based on what Tesla contends were numerous errors of law during the trial.

The table of contents of Tesla’s filing lays out the company’s rough arguments for why it’s requesting the verdict to be thrown out, with Tesla seeming to throw several arguments at the wall to see what sticks:

• I. Tesla Is Entitled to Judgment as a Matter of Law (or at Least a New Trial) on Liability.
  • A. The Verdict Is Unsupported by Reliable Expert Evidence.
  • B. Plaintiffs’ Design-Defect Theories Fail as a Matter of Law.
    • 1. Tesla’s 2019 Model S Was Not Defective.
    • 2. McGee Was the Sole Cause of Plaintiffs’ Injuries.
  • C. The Failure-to-Warn Claim Fails as a Matter of Law.
    • 1. Tesla Had No Duty to Warn.
    • 2. Tesla Provided Extensive Warnings.
    • 3. The Asserted Failure to Warn Didn’t Cause the Crash.
  • D. Tesla Is Entitled to a New Trial If the Record Cannot Sustain the Verdict as to Any Theory on Which the Jury Was Instructed.
• II. Highly Prejudicial Evidentiary Errors Warrant a New Trial on All Issues.
  • A. The Improper Admission of Data-Related Evidence Prejudiced Tesla.
  • B. The Improper Admission of Elon Musk’s Statements Prejudiced Tesla.
  • C. The Improper Admission of Dissimilar Accidents Prejudiced Tesla.
• III. This Court Should Grant Tesla Judgment as a Matter of Law on Punitive Damages or at Least Significantly Reduce Punitive Damages.
  • A. Florida Law Prohibits the Imposition of Any Punitive Damages in This Case.
  • B. Florida Law Caps Punitive Damages at Three Times the Compensatory Damages Actually Awarded Against Tesla.
  • C. The Due Process Clause Limits Punitive Damages Here to No More Than the Net Award of Compensatory Damages.
    • 1. Tesla’s Conduct Was Not Reprehensible.
    • 2. A Substantial Disparity Exists Between the $200 Million Award of Punitive Damages and the $42.3 Million Award of Compensatory Damages.
    • 3. Comparable Civil Penalties Do Not Justify the Punitive-Damages Award.
• IV. This Court Should Reduce the Grossly Excessive Award of Compensatory Damages to No More Than $69 Million.

In short, Tesla blames the driver (who was found 67% liable) fully for the crash, says that the Model S and its Autopilot system were state-of-the-art and not defective because “no car in the world at the time” could have avoided the accident, that it provided proper warnings even though it didn’t need to, that evidence was improperly admitted to prejudice the jury against Tesla, and that the punitive damages are excessive.

After looking through the document, Tesla’s main contention seems to be with the admission of various evidence that it says prejudiced the jury against Tesla.

Indeed, the only exhibit attached to the filing is a transcript of a podcast episode where one of plaintiffs’ experts talks about evidence that Tesla withheld data, which Tesla says should have been inadmissible and prejudiced the jury against it.

The plaintiffs repeatedly asserted that Tesla had deliberately withheld or tried to delete data, which required them to bring in third party experts to discover and examine the data.

Tesla says that the only reason these arguments were brought into court was to make the jury feel like there was a coverup, even though Tesla claims that there was no coverup. By repeatedly mentioning this, Tesla says the jury had a more negative view of the company than was fair.

It also says that Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s statements about Autopilot shouldn’t have been admissible, and that they prejudiced the jury against Tesla. Tesla says that the statements by Musk shown at the trial were irrelevant to plaintiffs’ case, exceeded the limits the court had set on which statements would be admissible, and that the admission of these statements “would disincentivize companies from making visionary projections about anticipated technological breakthroughs.”

You can read through the full filing here.

Update: After this story was published, plaintiffs’ attorneys reached out with their own statement

“This motion is the latest example of Tesla and Musk’s complete disregard for the human cost of their defective technology. The jury heard all the facts and came to the right conclusion that this was a case of shared responsibility, but that does not discount the integral role Autopilot and the company’s misrepresentations of its capabilities played in the crash that killed Naibel and permanently injured Dillon. We are confident the court will uphold this verdict, which serves not as an indictment of the autonomous vehicle industry, but of Tesla’s reckless and unsafe development and deployment of its Autopilot system.”  

–Brett Schreiber of Singleton Schreiber, lead trial counsel for plaintiffs Dillon Angulo & Naibel Benavides.

Electrek’s Take

Reading through the filing is persuasive at first, but remember that this is only one side of the story – and Tesla is well-known for never budging an inch in legal or reputational matters. (Update: for a quick reaction from “the other side,” see the statement by plaintiffs’ attorneys directly above).

Thinking a little deeper, the filing does rely on a similar “puffery” argument which Tesla has used before. The idea here is that Musk’s statements should be ignored because he, as the CEO of the company, has an incentive (and well-known tendency) to overstate the capabilities of its vehicles.

Lawyers did not use that exact word here, but they do claim that Musk’s statements are “forward-looking” and “visionary.”

But, for a guy who talks so much that he wasted $44 billion on a $12 billion social media site (twice) so that he could force his words in front of every user every day, denying that his words have an effect is a strange legal argument.

Indeed, Tesla has a history of not doing paid advertisements in traditional media, and has relied on Musk, and specifically Musk’s twitter account, to be the company’s impromptu communications platform. Musk even closed the company’s PR department, instead taking on the full burden of that himself.

So to argue that Musk’s statements shouldn’t be admissible, or that they didn’t set the tone for the organization, is more than a little silly.

While Tesla and Musk did state many times that Autopilot was not full self-driving (although, neither was the feature they marketed under the name, ahem, “Full Self-Driving”), the balance of Musk’s statements describing Tesla’s features definitely could have led a driver to think that the vehicles were more capable than any other vehicle on the road.

This is why it’s strange that Tesla also argues that “no other car” could have stopped in the situation of the crash. If your company is constantly claiming that you have the best, safest, most autonomy-enabled vehicle in the world (including in this filing, where it is referred to as “state of the art”), then who cares whether other cars could have done it or not? We’re talking about your car, not anything else.

Further, Tesla said that admitting these statements will put a chilling effect on every corporation’s ability to project anticipated breakthroughs in tech. To this I say, frankly: good. Enough with the nonsense, lets focus on reality, and lets stop excusing lies as corporate puffery, across all industries.

But this is an example of Tesla trying to have it both ways, to pretend that Musk’s statements are just puffery but also that they are important to breakthroughs and that silencing Musk would harm the company. Yes, it probably would harm Tesla’s outreach – because Musk’s statements are roughly the only source of Tesla’s advertising, which is why they ought to be heard to establish what the public thinks about the capabilities of Teslas.

And while Tesla says that cases like these would “chill” development of safety features if manufacturers are punished for bringing them to market, the punishment here isn’t for bringing the feature to market, it’s for overselling the feature in a way that set public expectations too high. Other features have not received this sort of scrutiny because other features don’t get pumped up daily with ridiculous overstatements by the company’s sole source of advertising.

On the other points, I’m not a lawyer. I’m not up to date on the specific limits to punitive damages in Florida. But on the surface, it seems fair to me that if a company was found to withhold data in an important case, after declining a settlement, that some level of significant punishment is fair.

After all, withholding data in a single non-fatal crash that wasn’t even their fault is what led Cruise to shut down operations everywhere. That may have been an overreaction and would certainly be an overreaction in this case with Tesla, given the driver’s responsibility for the crash. But in this case, the damage done to people (a death) was greater, and the damages Tesla is being told to pay ($243 million) will not lead to a shutdown of the entire company. Especially considering this is the same company that just managed to find tens of billions of dollars to give to a bad CEO.

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