An owner of Tesla Model X filed a complaint against Tesla Motors, claiming his vehicle started to accelerate on its own while being parked, ultimately crashing through a garage wall and into the owner’s home.
The person who filed a lawsuit is a South Korean actor Ji Chang Son; Son explained that his car spontaneously accelerated while being parked inside of a garage, breaching the wall and plowing onto the man’s home, according to a Facebook post published on New Year’s Eve. The incident took place during September 2016.
According to Reuters, the lawsuit reads: “The vehicle spontaneously began to accelerate at full power, jerking forward and crashing through the interior wall of the garage, destroying several wooden support beams in the wall and a steel sewer pipe, among other things, and coming to rest in Plaintiffs’ living room.”
The lawsuit also reads that between 2000 and 2010, the rate of SUA (sudden unintended acceleration) incidents was about 1 in 100,000. But, “Within the first year of Model X vehicles being on the road, and with only 16,000 Model X vehicles in use (the vast majority of which have been on the road significantly less than one year), there have been ten (10) reported incidents of sudden unintended acceleration — a staggeringly high rate of SUA incidents of 62 per 100,000 vehicles per year.”
Son filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in the Central District of California, seeking class action status. Since Tesla is able to send remote updates to its cars, the company is also able to provide detail analysis of the data available in its cars. Tesla stated that it had “conducted a thorough investigation” and that “The evidence, including data from the car, conclusively shows that the crash was the result of Mr. Son pressing the accelerator pedal all the way to 100 percent.”
Tesla Motors claim that Son threatened that company, saying that he’ll use his fame to smudge the company’s reputation if it didn’t provide him a financial compensation along with admitting that the malfunction in the Model X caused the accident, not Son.