So I contested it. That is what the officer told me to do. I got a hearing date, and then notice that the traffic court office was under construction so they gave me a new date with a new address for the hearing. I went to the hearing in mid-March. But I accidentally grabbed the wrong hearing notice so I went to the old court address not the one on the revised hearing notice. I ended up in a construction site. Luckily there were signs giving the new address and it was only a mile down the road.
As I was returning to my car, someone else pulled up and got out of another car. He was in a suit, dressed for court like I was. I told him about the new address, and we drove in a convoy to the correct courtroom. Once we got there we had to wait for our cases to be called. I asked him if he was a lawyer, yes he was. He asked me the same, and I told him "yes, but today I am pro se, this is my personal speeding ticket." I asked him if he was also representing himself (he did not have a client with him nor did he seem to be looking for anyone). "No," he said, "I represent Tesla."
This was a teeny-tiny court, the county municipal court-traffic division, pretty much the lowest court in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The courtroom itself was just an office building in a strip mall. No one but lawyers were dressed up, and instead of prosecutors, local police officers "prosecuted" the cases themselves.
A case was called before mine, when I was still waiting. The Tesla lawyer jumped up and went into the courtroom. Without anyone to chat with, I went in too so I could watch. The case was about a woman who got a ticket for reckless driving. She claimed she had her Tesla in driverless mode when it happened and that the car suddenly veered off and hit a pole on the side of the road. An officer happened to see it, and cited her for what looked like reckless driving. She had a lawyer, not the Tesla lawyer. The Tesla lawyer sat behind them, behind the gate that separated the parties to the case and the observers. But he sat in the first row of the observer section. The woman's lawyer would sometimes lean back over the gate so the Tesla lawyer could whisper in his ear.
They ended up cutting a deal. I think that's what everyone wanted. The woman had to pay a small fine on a reduced charge without any reckless driving on her record. The Judge didn't have to make a hard call whether the woman was responsible for what the driverless system did.
And, of course, I am sure that is what the Tesla lawyer wanted. The fact that Tesla paid enough attention to the dockets of tiny courts in the suburbs of Philadelphia and then hired a lawyer to go to rinky-dink municipal court, shows that they are worried about the liability issue. But they can't dodge the issue forever. There have been crashes that were a lot more serious than a car hitting a pole at a relatively slow speed on the side of the road. Maybe this case in Texas will be the one that does it.
