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.”
