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A Florida state judge has delayed the high-profile Tesla Fatal Crash Trial after months of discovery chaos, sanction threats, and missing witnesses — a procedural tangle now threatening to drag one of Tesla’s deadliest crash cases into next year.

During a tense Zoom hearing Thursday, Broward County Circuit Judge Michael A. Robinson granted the plaintiffs’ request to postpone the trial, citing continued discovery disputes and Tesla’s failure to produce key evidence. He ordered both sides to agree on a magistrate judge by Friday to untangle the procedural gridlock.

“Once I set a date, it will be set in concrete,” Judge Robinson warned. “We’ve got to speed through this — the Supreme Court frowns on delays.”

Attorneys Clash Over Discovery Failures

Attorney John Uustal, representing the family of 19-year-old Jazmin Alcala, who died in a fiery 2021 crash, argued that the case was “nowhere near trial-ready.” He said Tesla’s repeated discovery failures — including a missing engineer at a court-ordered deposition — made proceeding in January impossible.

“We still haven’t reviewed all of Tesla’s documents — they stripped out metadata, making them unusable,” Uustal told the court.

Tesla’s counsel, Ginger Boyd, pushed back, calling the plaintiffs’ version “misleading.” Boyd said the engineer’s deposition was canceled because the plaintiffs’ team had halted another deposition earlier in the week over a privilege dispute that required judicial clarification.

“Tesla is ready to move forward,” Boyd said. “We’ve met every court deadline and have been asking for depositions under plaintiffs’ control.”

Judge Sanctions Tesla Over “Useless” Evidence Dump

The trial delay follows an October 24 sanction order in which Judge Robinson rebuked Tesla for delivering more than 123,000 pages of testing documents without metadata or filenames — rendering them, in his words, “virtually useless.”

The documents, tied to tests of the 2021 Tesla Model 3 on uneven surfaces and speed bumps, were produced only in July 2025, after months of noncompliance with a November 2023 discovery order.

“Plaintiffs would have to print nearly 125,000 pages and manually match them to Tesla’s key,” Robinson said. “Had Tesla produced them in native format, review would’ve been manageable.”

The judge concluded that Tesla’s data dump was designed to make discovery “more difficult, time-consuming, and expensive.” Tesla was ordered to pay the plaintiffs’ attorney fees related to the sanction motion.

The Deadly Coral Gables Crash

The case stems from a September 2021 crash in Coral Gables, Florida, when Nicholas Garcia, 20, was driving his Tesla Model 3 at 90 mph in a 30-mph zone. After striking a speed bump, the car lost control, slammed into a tree, and burst into flames — killing Garcia and his passenger, Alcala.

Alcala’s family accuses Tesla of designing a defective suspension and chassis that failed under “ordinary and foreseeable driving conditions,” arguing the low frame and unprotected battery made the Model 3 fatally unsafe.

Garcia’s family filed its own suit, later consolidated with the Alcala case in 2022.

Lawyers and Next Steps

For Alcala’s estate:
Todd R. Falzone, John J. Uustal, and Joshua S. Novak of Kelley Uustal; and Noreek Davitian of Davitian Law.

For Tesla:
Nina C. Welch, Erica M. James, Ginger Barry Boyd, and Sandra G. Ezell of Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLP; Cory Hohnbaum and Philip R. Green of King & Spalding LLP; and Jeffrey A. Cohen, Samuel B. Spinner, and Dean A. Morande of Carlton Fields.