Tesla found partially liable for fatal 2019 crash, hit with $243M in damages

(Adobe Stock)

A jury found Tesla partially liable for a fatal 2019 crash in Key Largo, Florida, and slapped the company with $243 million in damages, a stunning rebuke for CEO Elon Musk’s company, which for years has avoided responsibility when its technology is involved in a crash.

After less than a day of deliberation, the eight-person jury ruled that Tesla’s driver assistance technology was partially to blame for enabling the driver, George McGee, to momentarily take his eyes off the road and then failing to warn him the road was ending. McGee’s Tesla plowed into a young couple standing off the road, killing 22-year-old Naibel Benavides Leon and gravely injuring her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo.

Along with the $200 in punitive damages, the jury ordered Tesla to pay $43 million of the compensatory damages due to the plaintiffs: $35 million to Benavides’s mother, $24 million to her father and $70 million to Angulo. The driver was found to be responsible for two-thirds of the accident, but he will not be required to pay his share of compensatory damages because he was not a defendant in this lawsuit.

The Benavides Leon family and Angulo had earlier sued the driver and reached a settlement. The plaintiffs then sued Tesla in a federal lawsuit in 2024, alleging that the company is to blame because it allowed its technology to operate on a road it was not designed for. Tesla said it was not liable for the crash because the law and its owners’ manual state the driver must be in control, no matter the feature engaged.

In his closing argument Thursday, Joel Smith, an attorney representing Tesla, lay the blame for the accident solely on the driver, McGee. “He said he was fishing for his phone,” Smith said. “It’s a fact. That happens in any car. That isolates the cause. The cause is he dropped his cellphone.”

On rebuttal, plaintiff’s attorney Brett Schreiber told jurors that Tesla promoted the autopilot feature knowing it increased the likelihood of distracting drivers. Schreiber displayed a 2016 statement by Musk saying the emergency braking feature could detect anything, including an alien spaceship or a hunk of metal in the road.

“In the [Tesla] showroom, it’s the greatest car ever made,” Schreiber said. “In the courtroom, they say it’s a jalopy.”

“Tesla knew for years that its product was defective,” he added. “Despite that people were using autopilot irresponsibly. This was a case of systematic failure.”

Neima Benavides, the deceased’s sister, said she was thankful to the jury. “They are a smart group of people,” she said, wearing a silver necklace with a small medallion of her sister’s fingerprint. “They paid attention for three weeks and they finally held this company accountable for what they did in 2019 and what they are still doing today.”

“We never agreed to settle. We never agreed to their conditions. Justice was done,” she added.

Angulo, whose injuries forced him to sit on a special pad to follow the proceedings, said: “This was a big moment and we had to … have courage [to] stand up to someone like this, you know, especially, you know, the richest guy in the world.”

Tesla 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,” the company said in a statement. “Florida law is explicit that punitive damages have been all but eliminated in product liability cases such as this one so we are confident that the punitive damage award at a minimum, and likely this whole verdict, will be overturned by the appellate court.”

The outcome is a massive blow to Musk, who has staked the future of his company on fully autonomous driving. Tesla is facing several similar lawsuits across the country that allege the CEO and his company have overstated the capabilities of the technology. Friday’s verdict could now open Tesla up to more liability in the future.

“The ruling begins to set the precedence of where liability lands within autonomy, and auto makers are going to be on the hook in a big way,” said Gene Munster, a Tesla investor and managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management.

The verdict comes at a particularly vulnerable moment for Tesla, which has been struggling since Musk’s controversial foray into politics. The company’s sales and profits tanked after Musk joined the Trump administration and led its controversial cost-cutting initiative, the U.S. DOGE Service. The billionaire left the administration after a fiery public fallout with the president over his spending bill – but Tesla’s finances have yet to recover.

Tesla previously faced two California juries in 2023 for alleged defects and was found not liable in both cases. It has also settled at least four such cases out of court that alleged defects with its technology, including one regarding a separate Autopilot-related case just days before the Miami trial was set to begin.

Across the country, in Oakland, California, state regulators are also fighting to remove Tesla’s ability to sell vehicles in California over allegations that it dangerously misled drivers to believe its cars could drive themselves without human oversight. That case is ongoing.

In Miami, Tesla faced a highly technical and emotional three-week trial as the Benavides Leon family and Angulo attended nearly every day. The families sat through much of the testimony and attentively listened as attorneys dissected the crucial seconds leading up to the crash. The two sides sparred over whether the company’s statements about Autopilot were misleading, whether the company was forthcoming about critical evidence in the case – and if the crash could have been prevented at all.

The case also tested public sentiment of Musk, a controversial figure known for pushing boundaries and evolving technology out to the public. Last month, Tesla launched its fully autonomous Robotaxi in Austin, despite a lack of federal regulation and clear safety guidelines. Beyond Tesla, Musk’s AI chatbot, Grok, came under fire last month after launching into an antisemitic rant.

Several days into the trial, a juror at was dismissed for perceived bias against Musk. The defense said it uncovered a “vitriolic and venomous” tirade against Musk on one of the juror’s social media pages, according to a court transcript provided to the Post. In a TikTok post from earlier this year, according to the transcript, the juror states “A good Nazi is a dead one. Do you agree? F-U Elon Musk.”

The plaintiffs’ attorney rested much of their defense on Musk’s statements about Autopilot, which they argue convinced his customers that his technology was more capable than reality. They highlighted statements from the CEO that claim Autopilot has “superhuman” sensors, that autonomous driving is a “solved” problem and that his technology can see any object on the road including “an alien spaceship.”

They also argued that Tesla acted recklessly by allowing Autopilot to function on roads it is not designed for. Tesla’s decision not to limit the technology to operate only on roads that meet the criteria in its own user manuals was the subject of a 2023 recall by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Still, the defense faced a tough legal battle, as Tesla has extensive warnings in its owners manual and the law indicates that drivers are responsible for the trajectory of the vehicle despite the type of feature engaged. The driver, McGee, told police at the scene that he took his eyes off the road to pick up a dropped cellphone.

McGee said on the witness stand that he wasn’t sure if he had heard Musk’s comments about the technology and didn’t believe they influenced his decision to buy the vehicle. He testified that he knew his Tesla “was not self-driving” and that it was his “job to always be alert as a driver.”

He also told the jury that he believed Autopilot would lead him to have an overall “safer drive” by helping him navigate on his long commute and avoid collisions.

“My concept was that it would assist me should I have a failure … or should I make a mistake,” he said. “And in that case I feel like it failed me.”

Tesla’s defense attorneys grilled both Angulo and Benavides Leon’s sister, Neima, about their previous lawsuit against McGee in which they settled over allegations that he operated his vehicle recklessly. The defense also mentioned the boat and home that Angulo purchased since the crash.

Both Neima Benavides and Angulo told the jury that they didn’t initially know McGee was using Autopilot when they sued him.

But as time passed, Neima Benavides said they learned there were “two components” in this accident.

“We have the driver,” she said. “And we have the car too.”