Tesla partly liable in Florida Autopilot trial, jury awards $200M punitive 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 awarded the plaintiffs $200 million in punitive damages, along with compensatory damages.
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.
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.”
