Owners of Tesla vehicles suing company for defections of autopilot

In the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court in San Jose (California), drivers are complaining on the Autopilot software stating that it is dangerously defective.

Vehicle owners stating that the cars, paid between $81,000 to $113,000, are acting strangely and often “lurching, slamming on the brakes for no reason, and failing to slow or stop when approaching other vehicles” when Autopilot is activated.

Tesla cars owners who are using automaker’s autonomous driving technology have “become beta testers of half-baked software that renders Tesla vehicles dangerous,” as the stated in the lawsuit. Tesla still didn’t officially comment the case which threatening to become a class-action of 47,000 owners of Model S and Model X cars sold in 2016 and 2017.

Tesla settles its lawsuit against former Autopilot Program Director

Another lawsuit connected to the autonomous driving where Tesla was involved got the settlement. Tesla settles its lawsuit against former Autopilot Program Director Sterling Anderson, accused of stealing information and engineers. Anderson left the company in December to start his own self-driving startup, Aurora Innovation, with Chris Urmson, a founding member of Google’s self-driving project, which recently became Waymo. The departure from Tesla was less than amicable since the company filed a lawsuit against Anderson claiming that he stole proprietary information about Tesla’s Autopilot program and poached engineers who were reporting to him.

The lawsuit was settled on Wednesday after Tesla withdraw their allegations without damages and Aurora agreeing to make itself available for an audit by a third-party to make sure they don’t have proprietary information from Tesla’s Autopilot program. Aurora also agreed to cover the cost of the audit for up to $100,000. The startup claims that it had already ordered its own audit, which found “no material Tesla confidential information”.

As for the allegations of poaching employees, Aurora has agreed not to reach out to Tesla employees for a year and to release the names of former Tesla employees who have joined the startup already.

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