Related Articles
After a three-week trial, a Miami jury on Friday found Tesla partially liable for a fatal 2019 accident involving its Autopilot driver-assistance feature, awarding the family of the deceased and an injured party a total of $329 million in damages. The company will have to pay a third of the $129 million in compensatory costs, or about $43 million, and up to $200 million in punitive damages.
The case concerned a crash in Key Largo, Florida, that occurred when driver George McGee dropped his phone while using Autopilot in his Tesla Model S. As he tried to pick it up, the car sped through a T-intersection at 62 miles an hour and plowed into a parked vehicle with two people standing on the other side, who were stargazing. Naibel Benavides, 22, flew about 75 feet and killed, while her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo, suffered broken bones and a traumatic brain injury.
McGee, who did not suffer any serious injuries, told the court that he had gotten potentially “too comfortable” with the Autopilot system, which was intended only to automate elements of highway driving. “My concept was it would assist me should I have a failure,” he said. “And in that case, I do feel like it failed me.” He said the car neither braked nor warned him of an imminent collision, despite flashing warning lights and a stop sign ahead of the intersection.
“Today’s verdict is wrong and only works to set back automotive safety and jeopardize Tesla’s and the entire industry’s efforts to develop and implement life-saving technology,” a company representative said in a statement shared with Rolling Stone. “We plan to appeal given the substantial errors of law and irregularities at trial.” Tesla maintains that McGee was solely at fault in the accident and had kept his foot on the accelarator pedal, overriding the Autopilot system.
For more than a decade, CEO Elon Musk has been promising that safe, autonomously driving Teslas will soon revolutionize travel. The company has been met with criticism and regulatory scrutiny for marketing its existing driver-assistance features with potentially misleading names such as “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving.” Most recently, Tesla rolled out driverless “Robotaxis” in Austin and San Francisco, sparking concerns from safety advocates.
The Florida jury’s decision, however, may set a precedent that threatens Tesla’s prospects for autonomous driving. Similar cases in the past were always dismissed our settled out of court; now the automaker may find itself faced with further legal actions over other injuries and fatalities from collisions involving a Tesla that had driver-assistance features engaged. Attorneys for the plaintiffs also argued that Tesla had withheld important data from the crash that their own forensic expert later found.
“Tesla designed Autopilot only for controlled access highways yet deliberately chose not to restrict drivers from using it elsewhere, alongside Elon Musk telling the world Autopilot drove better than humans,” Brett Schreiber, lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said in a statement shared with Rolling Stone. “Tesla’s lies turned our roads into test tracks for their fundamentally flawed technology, putting everyday Americans like Naibel Benavides and Dillon Angulo in harm’s way. Today’s verdict represents justice for Naibel’s tragic death and Dillon’s lifelong injuries, holding Tesla and Musk accountable for propping up the company’s trillion-dollar valuation with self-driving hype at the expense of human lives.”
Tesla Takedown, an activist movement calling for a boycott and protests against Tesla because of Musk’s oligarchic influence, far-right politics, and gutting of federal agencies as the former head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, also issued a statement on the case. “Elon Musk continues to run roughshod over the safety of the American people,” the organization said. “For years, Tesla deflected responsibility by blaming customers for misuse when the fault lay with their own technology. Today marks a turning point: Tesla is finally being held accountable for its dangerous vehicles.” The ruling, the group added, “opens up Tesla to potentially billions of dollars of liability, additional burden on a corporation that’s already failing in multiple domains.”
Tesla this month reported a decrease in quarterly profit — its third in a row. Sales have slumped in the U.S. and Europe in recent months, reflecting not just backlash against Musk as a public figure but the rise of electric vehicle competitors such as China’s BYD, which has produced new, cheap models while Musk hypes up humanoid robots, the flop Cybertruck, and a Hollywood diner. The billionaire did not mention the outcome of the Florida lawsuit on X, his social media platform, on Friday, but he did repost content about the quality of Tesla’s dashboard screens and how drivers can use Grok, the sometimes extremist chatbot developed by his AI company, as a voice assistant while on the road.
