The jury held Tesla responsible for $ 200 million in punitive damage, as well as further $ 43 million in compensatory damage. (Due to state laws, the company will probably end up paying less.) A jury has found the car manufacturer a third party head of the accident; He found the driver of the Tesla, who settled with the complaints and testified during the trial, responsible for the other two thirds.
In a written declaration, Tesla spokesman Jeff Mcandrews said that the “verdict is wrong”. Citing “substantial errors of law and irregularities during the trial,” said Tesla would appeal.
The cause derived from a 2019 accident in the Florida Keys in which the driver of a Tesla S model in automatic pilot pilot mode came to a T interaction and, unable to see that the roadway was ending, kept the foot on the accelerator; The car bangs against a parked vehicle and two people standing nearby. One of the pedestrians, the 22 -year -old Naibel Benavide Leon, was killed; His boyfriend, the 26 year old Dillon Angulo, was seriously injured.
Tesla’s lawyers claimed that the S model was not defective and said that the Tesla driver was fishing his cell phone at the time of the accident, and therefore he was just responsible.
Tesla’s automatic pilot function has been blamed in dozen anomalous arrests, but this is the first time that the company was held responsible for an antopilot arrest. The company was not held responsible in 2023 for two fatal accidents in California. And he resolved several legal actions outside the court, including one who involved a 2018 high profile accident that killed the driver of an X model in Silicon Valley. In 2023, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration prompted Tesla to issue an important recall related to the automatic pilot, after the United States’ road safety agency had spent two years studying fatal self -cilot accidents and raised concerns about the system encouraging the driver’s carelessness.
Separately, Tesla faced an administrative hearing from California last month after the state motor vehicles department sued the car manufacturer, claiming that it deceived customers on the limits of the automatic driver and its most recent and advanced function, autonomously driving (supervised). The hearing, which an administrative judge should resolve by the end of the year, could entail the loss of Tesla license to sell and produce vehicles in California for a maximum of 30 days.
During the three -week Miami trial, the lawyers representing the complaints claimed that Tesla and CEO Elon Musk created false expectations among drivers on Autopilot’s skills. The main lawyer Brett Schreiber mentioned a 2016 press conference in which Musk said that Tesla’s vision system meant that his cars “should not hit” nothing, also “an alien astronavi, a junk metal stack that fell from the back of a truck”.
Despite marketing, Tesla manuals claim that drivers must remain vigilant during the use of the automatic pilot and be ready to conquer the guide at a time. Tesla has added more “Nags” to its system following the recall of 2023, which requires drivers to pay more attention to the road and suspend access to self -cilot if the system detects too much carelessness. (After the tests, consumers report he questioned himself If these corrections resolve the inattention of the driver.)
“Tesla has chosen to put its automatic driver technology improved on the roads of this community knowing very well that the main government agencies for the safety of transport in this country … they had told Tesla for years to make its product safe,” Schreiber said in its opening declaration. “For years before this accident and for years after this accident, Tesla has ignored those warnings.”