The defense strategy of the accused Tesla owner was to blame her Autopilot, which she believed was designed and marketed to her to use as… wait for it… an Autopilot.
How dare she believe Autopilot meant Autopilot? She probably also believed she bought a car from a car company. Doesn’t she know CEO Elon Musk isn’t CEO Elon Musk? When nothing is real, Tesla can never be held accountable for even its most egregious crimes.
Thus, for a very simple reason, no matter how hard she tried to blame her Autopilot for its total failure to be an Autopilot, the Australian court instead swallowed an Elon Musk pill that released a fraudulent and deceptive Tesla from liability despite the clear and present design failures posing mass threat to society.
Agrawal spent two years maintaining her innocence, blaming the crash on Tesla’s autopilot feature and told police Ms Lagos “jumped in front of the car”.
But crash analysis showed Agrawal did not slow down before hitting Ms Lagos and the police investigation revealed just 30 seconds before the incident, autopilot was not turned on.
She didn’t slow down? That’s because she wasn’t paying attention, a tell-tale sign she was simply trusting what Elon Musk repeatedly had told her about her Autopilot. She was greedy, but not nearly as greedy as the true criminal in this story about advanced fee fraud.
Tesla is such a horrible and obvious fraud, that it has millions of drivers as victims utterly convinced of something false just because they paid for it in advance. This woman not only believed lies that Autopilot was a future safety device that would absolve her of risk today, she even believed lies that it was operating into the future when it wasn’t in present (because it disengaged without sufficient warning).
This case reads like a Venn diagram of liars buying from a liar who makes robots that lie.
Tesla should be banned for creating two out three circles that cause injury and death. Yet instead we see how accountability falls outside the vast majority and true causes of risk: Tesla management. The court is ignoring basically all the true causes and instead passively warning people to not buy Tesla, really to not buy Autopilot as an Autopilot, but that’s not going to solve the high threat to society fast enough.
Putting the victims of advanced fee fraud in jail doesn’t get to the heart of the crime, or stop it from spreading to many other victims.
Bottom line, if the driver had bought any other brand of car, she wouldn’t have hit a pedestrian. Without fraud there would be no Tesla.
