By Jonathan Stempel
(Reuters) -Tesla was sued on Monday by the estates of three people killed last September when their 2024 Model S equipped with Autopilot and Full Self-Driving features crashed on New Jersey’s Garden State Parkway.
The wrongful death lawsuit filed in the federal court in Camden, New Jersey, attributed the deaths of David Dryerman, 54; his wife Michele, 54; and their daughter Brooke, 17, to the car’s “defective and unreasonably dangerous design.”
Brooke’s older brother, Max Dryerman, was not in the car, and is also a plaintiff. The lawsuit seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.
Tesla, led by billionaire Elon Musk, did not immediately respond to requests for comment after market hours. The plaintiffs’ lawyers did not immediately respond to similar requests.
Musk’s company, based in Austin, Texas, has long faced questions about the safety of its self-driving technology.
Tesla has said its features are meant for “fully attentive” drivers with their hands on the steering wheel, and that the features do not now make its vehicles autonomous.
Under pressure from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Tesla agreed in December 2023 to recall more than 2 million vehicles in the United States to add safeguards to its Autopilot advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS).
According to published reports, the Dryermans were returning from a music festival on September 14, 2024, when their Model S ran off the road in Woodbridge Township, New Jersey, hitting a sign, guardrail and concrete bridge support.
The complaint said the car’s defective design caused it to stray from its lane of travel and fail to apply emergency braking, resulting in the crash.
It also said Tesla failed to warn David Dryerman, who was driving, that his Model S was unsafe, citing Musk’s statement in 2016 that Autopilot was “probably better” than human drivers.
The Dryermans were wearing seat belts, according to the complaint.
“Thousands of Tesla drivers have relied on Tesla’s ADAS technology as though it were capable of safe, fully autonomous self-driving with minor software updates when in fact it is incapable of safely handling a variety of routine roadway scenarios without driver input,” the complaint said.
The case is Dryerman et al v Tesla Inc, U.S. District Court, District of New Jersey, No. 25-11997.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Leslie Adler and Matthew Lewis)
