A Miami jury has ordered Tesla to pay $329 million in damages related to a 2019 fatal crash in which the car’s “autopilot” feature sped its driver through a stop sign into a parked car, killing one person and severely injuring the other.
NBC News reported that the federal jury found the electric car automaker partly liable for the accident, which the company initially blamed on driver George McGee, who was driving a Tesla Model S in Key Largo, Florida, during the accident.
Naibel Benavides, 22, was killed in the accident and her boyfriend Dillon Angulo, who was 27 at the time, was left with a traumatic brain injury and broken bones. They were standing next to the parked car that McGee’s Tesla struck.
The company previously claimed that its autopilot feature is safer than a human driving, yet counsel for the victims’ families shredded those claims in a scathing post-verdict statement.
“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,” Brett Schreiber, counsel for the plaintiffs, said in an e-mailed statement on Friday, NBC reported. “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.”
During a 2018 conference call, Musk claimed “complacency” with Tesla’s driver assistance systems is the true 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, Tech Crunch reported.
The payout puts an end to the trial, which began July 14. Specifically, Tesla must pay $129 million in compensatory damages, and $200 million in punitive damages, piling on to a mountain of company-related losses Musk has faced since his very public fall from MAGA’s good graces as President Donald Trump’s former “First Buddy.”
In recent months, Tesla stock has taken several hits amid Trump’s ever-changing trade war, with tensions boiling over online between the two men over the president’s economic policies. The company also reported a second consecutive quarter of year-on-year auto revenue decline, Yahoo Finance reported.
Trump accused Musk of being upset that his administration would be taking a torch to a previously established EV mandate, curbing incentives to purchase electric vehicles such as Teslas. “He’s very upset about things, but he can lose a lot more than that,” Trump told reporters at the White House on July 1.
In a statement, NBC News reported that Tesla made it known that it plans to appeal the verdict, writing, “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.”
