A Cybertruck owner in Texas is suing Tesla for $1,000,000 in damages for \u201c grossly negligent conduct\u201d following an accident on a Houston highway that involved the vehicle\u2019s self-driving feature. According to the lawsuit, Tesla is to blame for the crash because CEO Elon Musk has oversold the truck\u2019s ability to drive itself.As originally reported by the Austin American-Statesman, Justine Saint Amour bought a Cybertruck from a used car dealership in Florida and drove it until it crashed on a Houston overpass on August 18, 2025. That summer day, Saint Amour was driving down Houston\u2019s 69 Eastex Freeway with the vehicle\u2019s full self-driving (FSD) mode engaged.<\/p>\n
\u201cSomething terrifying happened, without warning, the vehicle attempted to drive straight off an overpass,\u201d Bob Hilliard, Saint Armour\u2019s attorney, told 404 Media in an emailed statement. \u201cShe tried to take control, but crashed into the barrier and was seriously injured\u2014mostly her shoulder, neck, and back.\u201dHilliard shared a photo of the aftermath of the crash and dashcam footage with 404 Media. In the video, the Cybertruck proceeds down the highway and hops an intersection instead of turning to the right and following the road. It\u2019s stopped when it slams into a signpost on the overpass.The lawsuit blames the crash on Musk. \u201cElon Musk is an aggressive and irresponsible salesman, who has a long history of making dangerous design choices, and over-promising the features of his products,\u201d the lawsuit said. \u201cThis promotion of products, for capabilities that they do not have, is the reason for this incident.\u201d
\nMusk has spent the past few years prompting Tesla\u2019s ability to drive itself, a feature that costs $99 a month and is sold as \u201cFull Self-Driving.\u201d But, the lawyers said, the FSD feature doesn\u2019t work as advertised and it\u2019s irresponsible of Tesla and Musk to market their vehicles as having the feature. \u201cDespite this dangerous condition of Tesla\u2019s \u2018self-driving\u2019 vehicles, Elon Musk and Tesla have made representations in the year 2019 that Tesla\u2019s full \u2018self-driving\u2019 vehicles were fully operational and safe.\u201dTesla and Musk have gotten in trouble for this before. In February, the company agreed it would stop using the terms \u201cautopilot\u201d and \u201cfull self-driving” when advertising its vehicles in California. There have been multiple fatal and non-fatal crashes involving Tesla vehicles running on autopilot, including a man who hit a parked police car in 2024. In August, a judge ordered Tesla to pay $200 million in punitive damages and another $43 million in compensatory damages to a family of a 22 year old who died in a crash involving the car\u2019s Autopilot system.According to the lawsuit, one of the reasons this keeps happening is because Musk intervened directly to make Teslas cheaper by using cameras instead of LiDAR, which uses laser light to create a 3D map of the surrounding area. \u201cElon Musk\u2019s intervention into the design of Tesla vehicles has long been reckless and dangerous. While engineers at Tesla recommended the super-human vision of LiDAR be included for self-driving vehicles, and competitors like Waymo and Cruise relied heavily on LiDAR, Musk chose instead to rely only upon cheap video cameras,\u201d the lawsuit said. \u201cMusk referred to the LiDAR used by his safer competitors as expensive and unnecessary.\u201dFully automated driving is a hard tech problem. LiDAR is better than basic cameras, but they\u2019re still not perfect and LiDAR-based self-driving cars crash too. There are other problems too. In cities operating Google\u2019s Waymo cars, passengers are leaving the doors open and Waymo is contracting DoorDashers to close them for $10 a pop, a Waymo in LA attempted to drive through a police standoff, and woman in San Francisco was trapped in a Waymo after men blocked the car and started to harass her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"