A Los Angeles resident named Justine Hsu sued Tesla in 2020 after an accident which she blamed on the company’s autopilot software. Hsu was seriously injured in the accident, apparently in part by the deployment of an airbad. She had a broken jaw and lost several teeth. She claimed her Model S had steered into the median so quickly that she was unable to stop it even though her hands were on the wheel as required. She sued Tesla for $3 million in damages. Today a California jury sided with Tesla in a case that was described by one outside observer as a “huge win” for the company.

Tesla denied liability for the 2019 accident. It said in a court filing that Hsu used Autopilot on city streets, despite Tesla’s user manual warning against doing so.

During a court hearing in Los Angeles Superior Court on Friday, the jury awarded Hsu zero damages. It also found that the airbag did not fail to perform safely, and that Tesla did not intentionally fail to disclose facts to her.

After the verdict, jurors told Reuters that the electric-vehicle maker clearly warned that the partially automated driving software was not a self-piloted system, and that driver distraction was to blame…

Ed Walters, who teaches a course on autonomous vehicles at Georgetown Law, called the verdict a “huge win” for Tesla.

One reason the case is considering significant is that it’s the first of several lawsuits blaming the company’s automation software for accidents. Reuters notes that there’s nothing binding about this particular decision by one jury in California. Nevertheless, the results in early trials often give you a sense of how later, similar trials are likely to go.

Reuters has a second story up in which they spoke to two of the jurors in the trial.

After the verdict on Friday, juror Mitchell Vasseur, 63, told Reuters that he and his fellow jurors felt badly for Hsu, but ultimately determined that Autopilot was not at fault.

“Autopilot never confessed to be self pilot. It’s not a self-driving car,” Vasseur said. “It’s an auto assist and they were adamant about a driver needing to always be aware.”…

Vasseur said Hsu’s accident would not have occurred if she had been more attentive, which he said was a mistake that anyone could make.

The jury foreperson made a similar comment, noting the car gives warnings that drivers must keep their hands on the wheel. And this might be the key point in the case. Hsu’s attorney said she was given such a warning to put her hands on the wheel less than a second before the crash. But that suggest, at least to me, that her hands were not on the wheel just prior to the crash. Maybe that’s why the jury didn’t side with her here.

Finally, there was a recent update on another case against Tesla. Back in 2021 Tesla lost a lawsuit brought by a worker who claimed he was subjected to racial epithets while working at the company’s Fremont, CA factory. The jury awarded the worker $137 million.

A federal jury in San Francisco has ordered Tesla to pay nearly $137 million to a Black elevator operator who accused the carmaker of ignoring racial abuse he faced while working at the automaker’s factory.

The plaintiff, Owen Diaz, said he worked at the factory in Fremont, Calif., for about a year in 2015 and 2016. There, he said, a supervisor and other colleagues repeatedly referred to him using racial slurs. He gave an account of his experience in a 2018 article in The New York Times.

About $7 million of that was for emotional damages and the rest was punitive. But last April a federal judge reduced the amount to $15 million.

The jury’s award, delivered in October, was pared to $15 million on Wednesday by Judge William H. Orrick of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco. The sum represents $1.5 million in compensatory damages and $13.5 million in punitive damages.

Diaz was unhappy that his award amount had been substantially reduced and somehow opted for a new trial over the proper amount he was owed. That new trial concluded earlier this month but not as he’d hoped.

A federal jury in San Francisco ordered Tesla on Monday to pay about $3.2 million to a Black man who had accused the carmaker of ignoring racial abuse he faced while working at its California factory.

The award was far less than the $137 million that a different jury awarded two years ago, mostly in punitive damages. The judge in that trial later reduced the figure to $15 million, prompting the plaintiff, Owen Diaz, to challenge the amount in a new trial.

But rather than more money, he will come away with less. After a five-day trial, the jury awarded $3 million in punitive damages, and $175,000 in past and future noneconomic damages.

Musk tweeted this reaction to the outcome at the time.

If we had been allowed to introduce new evidence, the verdict would’ve been zero imo.

Jury did the best they could with the information they had. I respect the decision.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 3, 2023

It’s not clear what the new evidence was but the NY Post reported that Diaz’s attorneys tried to get a mistrial over some questioning about his own statements.

On Friday, [Judge] Orrick denied a motion by Diaz’s lawyers for a mistrial. They claimed Tesla’s legal team violated Orrick’s bar on introducing new evidence in the retrial by questioning Diaz and other witnesses about incidents where he allegedly made racist or sexual comments.

I guess we’ll see if Diaz decides to settle for $3 million or wants to try his luck on an appeal.