MIAMI — A federal jury on Friday found Tesla partly liable in a 2019 car crash that killed a pedestrian and left another person badly injured when the car was in Autopilot mode.
The jury awarded the plaintiffs $43 million in compensatory damages for pain and suffering plus $200 million in punitive damages, which are intended to deter future harmful behavior by Tesla.
The verdict is a blow for Tesla and CEO Elon Musk as they try to convince the public, government regulators and investors that their self-driving software is safe.
The eight-person jury said that Tesla was partly to blame for the crash in the Florida Keys six years ago, when neither the driver of the Tesla sedan nor the Autopilot software braked in time for an intersection. The jury assigned Tesla one-third of the blame and assigned two-thirds to the driver, who was reaching for his cell phone at the time of the crash. He was sued separately.
The jury found that the plaintiffs experienced pain and suffering totaling $129 million, but Tesla will be required to pay only a third of that, or $43 million in compensatory damages, given its partial liability, a spokesperson for the plaintiffs' lawyers said.
Tesla denounced the verdict and said it planned to appeal.
“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. We plan to appeal given the substantial errors of law and irregularities at trial," Tesla said in a statement.
The verdict follows a three-week trial in Miami that threw a spotlight on how Tesla and Musk have marketed their driver-assistance software, which despite its name requires constant oversight by a human in the driver’s seat.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs argued Tesla oversold the capabilities of Autopilot, leading the driver of a Model S sedan to take his eyes off the road as he approached a T-intersection in the Florida Keys after sundown. The Tesla failed to stop at the intersection and slammed into a parked SUV, killing 20-year-old Naibel Benavides Leon as she was standing next to the SUV and injuring her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo.
The Tesla was traveling at 62 miles per hour just before the crash, according to data cited at trial. The intersection had a stop sign and a flashing red light.
Benavides Leon’s family and Angulo sued the driver and also Tesla, arguing that its Autopilot software should have warned the driver and braked before the vehicle crashed.
Jurors deliberated for seven hours Thursday afternoon and Friday before reaching a verdict. The verdict form asked jurors whether Tesla placed a vehicle on the market “with a defect which was a legal cause of damage” to the plaintiffs. The jurors found the answer was yes.
Punitive damages are generally intended to punish a defendant for especially harmful behavior and to deter similar behavior in the future.
Tesla maintained the driver was solely at fault.
"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," the company said in its statement Friday.
After the verdict was read in court, the two families hugged each other and their attorneys, with some crying. Angulo hugged his mother, visibly emotional.
U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom said she accepted the jury's verdict and would issue an order accordingly.
Most wrongful death lawsuits reach a settlement or are dismissed, but this lawsuit went to trial as a major public test of Tesla’s safety record. Tesla argued that the driver of the Model S was solely responsible for the crash because he was reaching for a dropped cellphone when it happened.
The driver, George McGee, testified during the trial he believed Autopilot failed him.
“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 be able to help me. And in that case, I do feel like it failed me,” he said.
The plaintiffs sued McGee separately, and that case was settled.
Autopilot comes standard on all Tesla vehicles and is a package of several driver-assistance features. Tesla warns drivers in its online owner’s manual that Autopilot requires supervision and does not make its vehicles fully autonomous.
But the plaintiffs said Tesla lulled drivers into a false sense of security, causing drivers to become distracted.
The plaintiffs asked for $109 million in compensatory damages from Tesla and $236 million in punitive damages.
Tesla and Musk have for years touted Autopilot and another package of driver-assistance software, Full Self-Driving, as major steps forward in automobile safety. Musk has said that Tesla cars using the software are safer than human drivers, and he has bet the future of the company on developing a fleet of safe, autonomous taxis.
But federal regulators and their counterparts in California have for years questioned the safety of Tesla’s systems. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration last year said there was a "critical safety gap" in Autopilot that contributed to at least 467 collisions, including 13 crashes resulting in fatalities.
Brett Schreiber, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, blamed Musk individually in his closing summary to the jury Thursday.
“It is Tesla’s CEO who created an expectation among consumers that Autopilot can perform beyond its limitations,” he said.
He also said Tesla’s driver-assistance technology was unproven but that the company hyped it anyway.
“We are here because Dillon Angulo and Neima Benavides were part of a beta test they never signed up for,” he said.
Joel Smith, a lawyer for Tesla, told the jury in his closing summary that the driver of the Model S, not the vehicle software, was to blame for the crash.
“Can it happen in any car? Of course it can. Does it happen in any car? Of course it does,” he said.
Smith told jurors that McGee had traveled safely through the same intersection 30 to 40 times previously, without incident.
“The only thing that changed was the driver’s behavior,” he said.
Musk did not appear in the Miami federal courtroom during the three-week trial, though his name came up, including during the jury selection process.
David Ingram reported from San Francisco, and Maria Piñero from Miami.
