Tesla was found partially liable in a wrongful death lawsuit in a federal court in Miami today. It’s the first time that a jury has found against the car company in a wrongful death case involving its Autopilot driver assistance system—previous cases have been dismissed or settled.
In 2019, George McGee was operating his Tesla Model S using Autopilot when he ran past a stop sign and through an intersection at 62 mph then struck a pair of people stargazing by the side of the road. Naibel Benavides was killed and her partner Dillon Angulo was left with a severe head injury.
While Tesla said that McGee was solely responsible, as the driver of the car, McGee told the court that he thought Autopilot “would assist me should I have a failure or should I miss something, should I make a mistake,” a perception that Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk has done much to foster with highly misleading statistics that paint an impression of a brand that is much safer than in reality.
The jury heard from expert witnesses about Tesla’s approach to human-machine interfaces and driver monitoring, as well as its use of statistics, then considered their verdict on Thursday afternoon and Friday before deciding that, while McGee was two-thirds responsible for the crash, Tesla also bore a third of the responsibility for selling a vehicle “with a defect that was a legal cause of damage” to Benavides’ relatives and Angulo. The jury awarded the plaintiffs $129 million in compensatory damages, and a further $200 million in punitive damages.
