Young New Jersey Man Sues Elon Musk’s Tesla After His Entire Family Perishes in EV Crash

Breitbart ^ | June 29th, 2025 | Lucas Nolan

[ChicagoConservative27]

A New Jersey man has filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk’s Tesla, alleging that the EV giant’s design defects led to a fatal crash on the Garden State Parkway that claimed the lives of his parents and teenage sister.

New York Daily News reports that Max Dryerman, a 19-year-old resident of New Jersey, is seeking damages from Tesla following a tragic accident on September 14, 2024, which resulted in the deaths of his 54-year-old parents and 17-year-old sister. The family was traveling in a 2024 Tesla Model S on the Garden State Parkway in Woodbridge when the vehicle veered off the road, striking a guardrail and a concrete bridge support.

According to the lawsuit filed last week in a Camden federal court, Dryerman claims that the Tesla’s “defective and unreasonably dangerous design” was responsible for the fatal crash. The car was equipped with advanced safety features, including forward collision warning, lane departure avoidance, and emergency lane departure, which the suit claims should have prevented the vehicle from leaving its lane and crashing.

[BobL]

“Air bags do not save lives. Air bags provide no better margin of safety than seat belts alone. The argument for air bags is that they passive restrains. However empirical evidence does not show any safety benefit for similar vehicles with over those without.”

Might you have any studies to that effect? I’ve always had difficulty in understanding how airbags can do more than seat belts in restraining people in crashes. As you imply the case for airbags was that people didn’t wear seatbelts...well that bridge has been crossed, every state now has seat belt laws (some pretty silly, like making high school kids sit in boosters, but that’s another issue), and the vast majority of people wear their seat belts. So are airbags even needed anymore?

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

There was good article about 10-20 years ago, in National Review on dead tree, iirc. People are risk compensators. The “safer” you make something, the more chances people take. Seat belts definitely do save lives, if used. My late wife was short and when she drove she basically had an air rifle aimed at her eyes. Short women are liable to be blinded by airbags in what would otherwise have been a fender bender.

[BobL]

“People are risk compensators. The “safer” you make something, the more chances people take.”

Thanks, I remember hearing the same, and I think it was the insurance companies that figured it out.

Regarding seat belts - decades back, in my younger days, I got pulled over a number of times for speeding - but I ALWAYS wore my seat belts, even though there were no laws then. I’m convinced there was a psychological effect on policemen when they saw a seat belt on a person as they walked up. I got mad with seat belt laws, since I no longer had that advantage, since everyone ended up wearing seat belts.

As to air bags, your wife wasn’t alone with having an explosive directed at her as several hundred infants got decapitated in otherwise minor crashes (in the early years of airbags)...but they had to keep it all quiet, or no more air bags. I also wonder how many overheated dead infants were due to parents and grandparents having to put the infants in the back seat, to keep them away from air bags.

I would just like to know what, if anything, is the net benefit of air bags over seat belts. I know they cost thousands per car, but I’m not even sure that they’re not net-negatives regarding safety, as overpriced efforts in the name of ‘safety’ often lead to just the opposite (such as making nuclear plants so ‘safe’ that they’re no longer built, so more people die from coal-related accidents and illnesses).