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Tesla wants Apple to testify in its upcoming wrongful death lawsuit over its Autopilot feature, proving that The Apple engineer behind this was playing games instead of paying attention.
Tesla will go on trial on April 8 over a fatal 2018 crash involving Autopilot and whether its software is to blame for the crash. However, lawyers representing the family of the dead driver, Apple engineer Wei “Walter” Huang, accused Apple of working with Tesla to help the case.
The preliminary motion, filed earlier this week, states that Apple “engaged in a secret workaround to assist Tesla in defending a pending case,” The Verge reported.
The US National Transportation Safety Board's initial ruling on the crash found that the 2018 crash in Mountain View, California, occurred because the Tesla Model X's Autopilot failed to recognize an obstacle , resulting in a collision with a highway barrier at 71 mph. fire due to battery failure.
At the time, the NTSB determined that the iPhone Juan was using was running a strategy game as its primary application at the time of the crash. However, there was not enough log data to determine whether he was actively playing the game at the time of the crash itself.
The logs did show that there was an “active gaming pattern” that coincided with the morning commute hours, while pre-impact data transmission was “consistent with online gaming activity.” The family says Juan played the game passively.
Ultimately, the NTSB said the evidence was “not specific enough to determine whether the Tesla driver was holding a phone at the time of the crash.”
New declaration
The family is unhappy with Tesla's decision to file a declaration from Apple engineer James Harding, who said that Apple determined that Huang was actively playing the game at the time of the outage.
In addition, Tesla and Apple are accused of “attempting to circumvent the discovery process” by using Harding's words as testimony rather than testimony. The affidavit also comes five months after the end of the discovery period, which meant the family's lawyers couldn't question Harding until after trial.
Lawyers have subpoenaed Apple for more information about the declaration. Apple responded in March that lawyers were seeking “a significant amount of confidential Apple material.”
In its application to quash the subpoena, Apple said it was not a party to the case and had not received any notice of a court order in the dispute. “While Apple is willing to work in good faith with the parties and fulfill its obligations as a non-party witness, it is very unclear about its current obligations and seeks the Court's guidance,” its lawyers wrote.
The announcement could be critical to Tesla's defense strategy because the automaker believes Autopilot is safe to use and only becomes dangerous when drivers aren't paying attention to the road.
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