Elon Musk won’t have to testify — for now — in a lawsuit where Tesla Inc.’s Autopilot is blamed for a fatal crash that killed an Apple Inc. software engineer.
(Bloomberg) — Elon Musk won’t have to testify — for now — in a lawsuit where Tesla Inc.’s Autopilot is blamed for a fatal crash that killed an Apple Inc. software engineer.
Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Evette Pennypacker granted Tesla’s request to shield Musk from being questioned at a hearing on Thursday. But the ruling is subject to the carmaker providing written responses to questions the lawyers for deceased driver’s family have about claims the company and its chief executive officer made about Autopilot, she said.
The family of Walter Huang, who died in a crash while using Autopilot in his Model X in March 2018, must try “less intrusive” ways to get information it’s looking for to build the case before pushing Musk to take the witness stand, Pennypacker said.
Plaintiffs suing Tesla in a slew of Autopilot crash cases are yet to get Musk, who has championed autonomous driving as the way of the future, to answer questions under oath.
A Florida judge last year ruled that the CEO doesn’t have to sit for a deposition in another case stemming from the 2019 death of Jeremy Banner, 50, who died when his Tesla Model 3 crashed into the underside of a semi-trailer truck crossing a Florida highway.
There’s no way of knowing whether there was data backing public statements made by Tesla and Musk about Autopilot’s capabilities unless the billionaire entrepreneur is deposed, Doris Cheng, a lawyer representing the family told the judge. Former and current Tesla engineers who’ve been questioned so far have been unable to answer that question at the heart of negligence claims in the suit, Cheng said.
That’s “simply not correct,” Tesla’s attorney Tom Branigan, said at the hearing. The engineers were deposed for long hours and answered questions “from A to Z on the design and development of Autopilot,” he said.
In October, Bloomberg News reported that prosecutors in the US Justice Department’s Washington and San Francisco offices and investigators at the Securities and Exchange Commission were probing whether the company made misleading statements about its vehicles’ automated-driving capabilities.
A trial in the Huang case is set for July 31. If it goes to trial before the Banner case, in which the judge has set a summer time frame but is yet to schedule a specific date, it’ll be the first case involving an Autopilot crash to go to trial.
The case is Huang v. Tesla, Inc., 19CV346663, in Santa Clara County Superior Court.
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