Picture this: you’re finally cruising in your new car down I-10 East to downtown Houston; and your car is nice, the one with all those “self-driving” features. So, you go showing your friends your “no hands technique,” with your hands nowhere near the wheel—because the manufacturer swore this car could see better than you ever could.
However, suddenly, a sensor glitches. The hardware is fine but some software patch didn’t account for a stalled semi-truck in the I-10 shoulder. Your high precision LiDAR array (used for obstacle avoidance and path planning) is blinded by the glare of the hot Texas sun; and unfortunately, in the half-second it takes you to process what’s happening, thousands of pounds of unbiased steel have already decided the fate for you and or your family.
This is no longer science fiction. It’s Tuesday traffic.
Autonomous and driver-assist vehicles are multiplying on Texas roads faster than the regulations meant to govern them. And it’s not just cars — it’s the 80 mph semi-trucks, buses, cabs, the app-controlled e-scooter that decides to lock its wheels mid-ride, the medical device monitoring or controlling your heart rate, the industrial hydraulic lift at home or on the petroleum plant floor, or the “intelligent” ladder-lift in your company’s warehouse.
Every year, we hand more life-and-death decisions to microelectronics, code, sensors, and machine learning models that were rushed to market by companies chasing a launch date. However, when that technology fails, it often doesn’t fail gently. It fails at 75 miles an hour, mid-surgery, or when sleep 30,000 feet in the air. Wherein, companies love to talk about “unavoidable accidents” and “user error” as soon as their product injures someone or worse. However, these injures are rarely unavoidable. It’s usually a defect in the design, the manufacturing, or in the failure to warn you of the potential of what the product actually shouldn’t do.
Even despite this, here’s the part that should really worry you: as an engineer and an attorney, I’ve read the Eric Mitchell v. Research In Motion Ltd cases. I’ve read the depositions where software teams knew about “unreasonable risk factors.” I’ve seen emails where, “we’ll patch it in the next release” meant “yea, we hear you Joe but let’s go ahead and tape this one out,” i.e., let’s ship a known defective product—and just hope that no one gets hurt before we can fix it.
But there is good news. As the car driving next to you would say, if cars could talk—you are not alone.
Texas law actually works in your favor here. Under the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code Chapter 82, a manufacturer or seller can be held strictly liable for a defective product — meaning you don’t have to prove they were careless, only that the defective product was unreasonably dangerous and that it caused your injury. Texas recognizes three types of defects: a design defect (the product was dangerous built exactly as intended), a manufacturing defect (something went wrong during production), and a marketing defect (meaning, they didn’t warn you about a known danger). For autonomous vehicles, specifically, this could mean a sensor array itself was poorly designed, the verification test data missed real-world risk cases, or that a company failed to disclose the vehicle’s limitations clearly enough for you to drive safely.
Texas also has a proportionate responsibility rule under Chapter 33 — so, if you’re found more than 50% at fault when injured, you can’t recover. But this cuts both ways. Juries and insurance adjusters will often try to shift blame onto the human driver of an autonomous vehicle, when many times the real failure was in the machine. An experienced injury attorney knows how to obtain the vehicle’s black-box data, software logs, and the manufacturer’s internal testing records to show who or what was actually in control when things went wrong. Also, don’t wait too long to act: Texas generally gives you two years from the date of injury to file a personal injury claim, and that clock doesn’t pause for you to figure out whether it was “the car’s fault” or yours.
Just Call X Bennett Law. We’ve built this firm at the intersection of engineering and injury litigation—because it is a lot easier to win a fight against a company’s defense team when your attorney can actually read source code, decode sensor logs, and speak fluent “defect” to a jury when necessary. We demand Justice, and that all negligent parties pay our client’s what is owed. We’re not intimidated by your PhD and PowerPoint.
