After two weeks of testimony, a Florida jury has found Tesla partially responsible for the death of one person and causing serious injuries to another in a crash where the driver was using the company’s much-touted Autopilot system.
The jury awarded Dillon Angulo and the family of Naibel Benavides $329 million in Friday’s verdict – $129 million in compensatory damages and $200 million in punitive charges. However, the jury found that the driver bore two-thirds of the responsibility for the crash and Tesla was only one-third responsible. That sets the compensatory damages at $43 million and, under Florida law, punitive charges are limited to three times any compensation – but that punitive fine is all on Tesla, assuming it holds up under appeal.
The case stems from a crash in Key Largo on April 25, 2019, when Tesla Model S driver George McGee struck the pair’s car after running through a stop sign and a stop light. In court, he claimed he was trying to retrieve a dropped mobile phone and thought the car would take care of things.
“My concept was it would assist me should I have a failure or should I miss something, should I make a mistake, that the car would also be able to help me,” he testified. “And in that case, I do feel like it failed me. I believe it didn’t warn me of the car and the individuals and nor did it apply brakes.”
Instead, the Tesla smashed into the couple’s car at around 70 mph. Benavides died at the scene of the accident and Angulo suffered brain damage and broken bones and still requires care to this day.
The plaintiffs argued that Musk and Tesla had not only massively oversold the capabilities of the Autopilot software, but also made a wrongheaded decision not to geo-lock it to be used only on freeways, which it was designed for, instead allowing it to be used on all roads. The jury seems to have accepted at least part of that argument, finding that Tesla sold the car with a “defect” that was a “legal cause of damage” to the plaintiffs, according to the verdict form, while also finding the driver negligent.
“It is my professional opinion that Tesla’s Autopilot is defective because Tesla knowingly allows the car to be operated in operational domains for which it is explicitly not designed for,” testified former National Highway Traffic Safety Administration senior safety advisor Mary Louise “Missy” Cummings. “I believe that they were using that as a way to sell more cars.”
When asked about Musk’s boast that a Tesla with the systems would “drive safer than a human,” she responded, “It wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now.”
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Not that the human driver of the electric car comes out of this looking good either. Alan Moore, accident reconst