Miami Jury Tesla was partially responsible in a 2019 crash on Friday, causing one person and injuring another, while the Model S driver used the automaker’s self-driving driving assistance feature.
The jury believes Tesla’s punitive damages amount to $200 million, plus $43 million in damages. (The company may eventually pay less due to state law.) The jury found that the vehicle was one-third responsible for the crash; it found Tesla’s driver, who settled with the plaintiff and testified during the trial, responsible for the other two-thirds.
Tesla spokesman Jeff McAndrews said in a written statement that the “verdict was wrong”. He cited “serious legal and irregular errors in the trial”, and he said Tesla would appeal.
The lawsuit stems from a 2019 crash in Florida Keys, in which the driver of the Tesla model allegedly had a T-communication in Testlection and failed to see the road ended, and he kept stepping onto the accelerator. The car hit a parked vehicle and two people stood nearby. One of the pedestrians, 22-year-old Naibel Benavides Leon, was killed. Her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo, 26, was seriously injured.
Tesla’s lawyer argued that the Model S was not flawed and claimed that the Tesla driver was fishing for his phone at the time of the crash, so he was completely responsible.
Tesla’s autonomous driving capabilities have been blamed for dozens of crashes, but this is the first time the company has found responsibility for a crash related to autonomous driving. The company is not responsible for two fatal California crashes in 2023. It has settled several lawsuits in court, including a high-profile 2018 crash that killed a Silicon Valley Model X driver. In 2023, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration urged Tesla to issue a major recall related to autopilot after the U.S. Roadway Safety Agency spent two years investigating a fatal crash in autonomous driving and raising concerns about the system, encouraging drivers to take heart.
Additionally, Tesla faced an administrative hearing in California after suing automakers in the state’s motor vehicles last month, claiming it misled customers about autopilot restrictions and their updated, more advanced features, fully autonomous driving (supervised). The administrative judge will be determined to hear later this year, which could result in Tesla losing its license to sell and manufacture vehicles in California for up to 30 days.
At the three-week Miami trial, lawyers representing the plaintiffs argued that Tesla and CEO Elon Musk had false expectations between drivers of autonomous driving capabilities. Principal attorney Brett Schreiber quoted a 2016 press conference, Musk said Tesla’s visual system means that its cars “should not hit” anything, even “an alien spacecraft, a pile of junk metal falling from the back of a truck.”
Despite marketing, Tesla Manual insists that drivers still need to be alert when using Autopilot and take over when they are ready. After the 2023 recall, Tesla has added more “nas” to its system, which requires drivers to keep a close eye on the road and pause access to the autopilot if the system detects too much attention. (After testing, Consumer Reports questioned whether these fixes addressed drivers’ attention.)
“Tesla chose to put its enhanced autonomous driving technology on the road of this community, which is well aware that the country’s leading government transport safety agency … has been telling Tesla for years to make its products safer,” Schreiber said at the opening ceremony. “Tesla ignored these warnings before and years after the crash.”
