>It also said police reports revealed that Speckman was found to be driving with a blood alcohol level more than twice the legal limit.
Driving under the influence, what more is there to say?
Driving under the influence, what more is there to say?
>The suit blamed the “propensity of the vehicle to catch fire, as well as the defective design of the door latch system entrapping him in the vehicle.”
[0] https://www.indystar.com/story/news/crime/2017/02/08/tesla-m...
So... Poe's Law here. I can't tell if this is a sarcastic comment pointing out that a defective design remains defective even if someone is drunk, or whether this is a serious comment implying it wasn't really defective in normal circumstances.
In any case, the person who was trapped-and-died was the passenger, and we don't know if or how-much they were drunk.
The driver survived... or else they're making a lawsuit from beyond the grave.
Instead, the driver died on the scene and the passenger later in a hospital [0]. More digging shows driver and passenger were (probably posthumously) tested at 0.21 and 0.17 BAC respectively. [1]
[0] https://www.indystar.com/story/news/crime/2016/11/03/2-kille...
[1] https://www.indystar.com/story/news/crime/2017/02/08/tesla-m...
> Tesla maintains there was nothing wrong with the car. It said the data event recorder showed that Speckman kept her foot on the accelerator pedal before the crash and never attempted to brake.
The family settling could seen as support for this claim. If it really did accelerate randomly, that seems like more of an NHTSA (or whoever) sort of thing more than something that could be settled.
Since that's not the case--and I don't think anyone has even suggested it needs to be--we can safely infer that there's already a high degree of nuance and splitting of different levels and layers of responsibility going on.
At the end of the day, "operator error"--even drunken operator error--is not enough to automatically negate all safety flaws.