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Tesla partly liable in Florida Autopilot trial, jury awards $329M in damages
A jury in federal court in Miami has found Tesla partly to blame for a fatal 2019 crash that involved the use of the company’s Autopilot driver assistance system.
The jury assessed punitive damages only against Tesla, CNBC reported. The punitive fines coupled with a compensatory damages puts the total payments to around $242.5 million.
Neither the driver of the car nor the Autopilot system braked in time to avoid going through an intersection, where the car struck an SUV and killed a pedestrian. The jury assigned the driver two-thirds of the blame, and attributed one-third to Tesla. (The driver was sued separately.)
The verdict comes at the end of a three-week trial over the crash, which killed 20-year-old Naibel Benavides Leon and severely injured her boyfriend Dillon Angulo. The verdict is one of the first major legal decisions about driver assistance technology that has gone against Tesla. The company has previously settled lawsuits involving similar claims about Autopilot.
Brett Schreiber, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement to TechCrunch that 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.”
“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,” said Schreiber. “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, in a statement provided to TechCrunch, said it plans to appeal the verdict “given the substantial errors of law and irregularities at trial.”
“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,” the company wrote. “To be clear, no car in 2019, and none today, would have prevented this crash. This was never about Autopilot; it was a fiction concocted by plaintiffs’ lawyers blaming the car when the driver — from day one — admitted and accepted responsibility.”
Tesla and Musk spent years making claims about Autopilot’s capabilities that have led to overconfidence in the driver assistance system, a reality that government officials — and Musk himself — have spoken about for years.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) came to this determination in 2020 after investigating a 2018 crash where the driver died after hitting a concrete barrier. That driver, Walter Huang, was playing a mobile game while using Autopilot. The NTSB made a number of recommendations following that investigation, which Tesla largely ignored, the safety board later claimed.
On a 2018 conference call, Musk said “complacency” with driver assistance systems like Autopilot is a problem.
“They just get too used to it. That tends to be more of an issue. It’s not a lack of understanding of what Autopilot can do. It’s [drivers] thinking they know more about Autopilot than they do,” Musk said at the time.
The trial took place at a time when Tesla is currently in the middle of rolling out the first versions of its long-promised Robotaxi network, starting in Austin, Texas. Those vehicles are using an enhanced version of Tesla’s more capable driver assistance system, which it calls Full Self-Driving.
Update: This story has been updated to include the amount of compensatory damages in the total.
Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.
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