Elon Musk told the father of a teenager who died in a Tesla Model S crash that the carmaker made a mistake in removing a speed limiter from the vehicle without the father's permission, a lawyer for the family said in court.
Curtis Miner, the attorney, told a jury Thursday that the
billionaire chief executive officer of Tesla Inc. made a “critical confession”
when James Riley asked him in a May 2018 phone conversation how a device that
was supposed to prevent the vehicle from going faster than 85 miles per hour
was removed before 18-year-old Barrett Riley veered off a Florida road at 116
miles per hour and hit a wall.
After confirming that James Riley, through his company, was
the registered owner of the car, Musk said Tesla technicians shouldn't have
removed the speed limiter without his authorisation, according to the lawyer's
account of the phone call.
“Well, I guess we shouldn't have taken the limiter off,”
Riley recalled Musk saying when he took the witness stand to testify against
Tesla. Riley said the CEO told him that Tesla would review its policies.
In his opening argument at a trial that's scheduled to run
through next week in federal court in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Miner said the
company's failure to communicate with Barrett's parents made all the
difference.
“If Tesla had taken the most simplest steps to tell Jim and
Jenny Riley what they'd done,” this accident wouldn't have happened, he said.
The negligence case is the first for the world's most
valuable automaker over a fatal crash involving one of its vehicles. The electric
car-maker faces a flurry of lawsuits over accidents blamed on its Autopilot
driver-assistance feature that have also drawn increasing scrutiny from safety
regulators.
Tesla's attorney presented a very different narrative to the
six-person jury.
“A speed limiter is not a safety device,” Vince Galvin said.
“Is it all right if they crash at 85 mph instead of 116 mph?”
Tesla has said that Barrett Riley went in person to the
Tesla facility where the Model S was being serviced and “tricked” its staff
into removing the speed limiter.
“Tesla is not in a position to police the Rileys' children,”
Galvin said.
Galvin disputed what happened on the phone call between Musk
and Riley. Musk isn't a witness in the case.
“If Musk told him they something did something wrong,” Riley
would have told the National Transportation Safety Board that during the
agency's investigation of the accident, but he “disclosed nothing,” the lawyer
said.
Galvin said Barrett was known among friends and family for
driving “recklessly” and “dangerously.” His mother urged his friends to stop
him from speeding, saying she was worried for their safety, the lawyer said.
“The Rileys negligently entrusted their vehicle to Barrett
because they knew and should have known he had driving issues,” Galvin said. ©
Bloomberg L.P
0 comments:
Post a Comment