A decide has discovered “cheap proof” that Elon Musk and different executives at Tesla knew that the corporate’s self-driving know-how was faulty however nonetheless allowed the vehicles to be pushed in an unsafe method anyway, in accordance with a latest ruling issued in Florida.

Palm Seashore county circuit court docket decide Reid Scott stated he had discovered proof that Tesla “engaged in a advertising and marketing technique that painted the merchandise as autonomous” and that Musk’s public statements concerning the know-how “had a major impact on the idea concerning the capabilities of the merchandise”.

The ruling, reported by Reuters on Wednesday, clears the way in which for a lawsuit over a deadly crash in 2019 north of Miami involving a Tesla Mannequin 3. The car crashed into an 18-wheeler truck that had turned on to the street into the trail of driver Stephen Banner, shearing off the Tesla’s roof and killing Banner.

The lawsuit, introduced by Banner’s spouse, accuses the corporate of intentional misconduct and gross negligence, which might expose Tesla to punitive damages. The ruling comes after Tesla received two product legal responsibility lawsuits in California earlier this 12 months targeted on alleged defects in its Autopilot system.

Choose Scott additionally discovered that the plaintiff, Banner’s spouse, ought to be capable of argue to jurors that Tesla’s warnings in its manuals and “clickwrap” had been insufficient. He stated the accident is “eerily related” to a 2016 deadly crash involving Joshua Brown wherein the Autopilot system did not detect crossing vehicles.

“It will be cheap to conclude that the Defendant Tesla by means of its CEO and engineers was aware of the issue with the ‘Autopilot’ failing to detect cross site visitors,” the decide wrote.

Banner’s lawyer, Lake “Trey” Lytal III, stated they’re “extraordinarily happy with this consequence based mostly within the proof of punitive conduct”.

The decide additionally cited a 2016 video displaying a Tesla car driving with out human intervention as a solution to market Autopilot. The start of the video reveals a disclaimer which says the particular person within the driver’s seat is simply there for authorized causes. “The automobile is driving itself,” it stated.

Choose Scott stated that “absent from this video is any indication that the video is aspirational or that this know-how doesn’t at present exist out there”, he wrote.

Bryant Walker Smith, a College of South Carolina regulation professor, instructed Reuters that the decide’s abstract of the proof was important as a result of it suggests “alarming inconsistencies” between what Tesla knew internally, and what it was saying in its advertising and marketing.

“This opinion opens the door for a public trial wherein the decide appears inclined to confess a number of testimony and different proof that might be fairly awkward for Tesla and its CEO,” Smith stated. “And now the results of that trial might be a verdict with punitive damages.”