After two weeks of testimony, a Florida jury has found Tesla partially responsible for the death of one person and causing serious injuries to another in a crash where the driver was using the company's much-touted Autopilot system.

The jury awarded Dillon Angulo and the family of Naibel Benavides $329 million in Friday's verdict - $129 million in compensatory damages and $200 million in punitive charges. However, the jury found that the driver bore two-thirds of the responsibility for the crash and Tesla was only one-third responsible. That sets the compensatory damages at $43 million and, under Florida law, punitive charges are limited to three times any compensation – but that punitive fine is all on Tesla, assuming it holds up under appeal.

The case stems from a crash in Key Largo on April 25, 2019, when Tesla Model S driver George McGee struck the pair's car after running through a stop sign and a stop light. In court, he claimed he was trying to retrieve a dropped mobile phone and thought the car would take care of things.

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"My concept was it would assist me should I have a failure or should I miss something, should I make a mistake, that the car would also be able to help me," he testified. "And in that case, I do feel like it failed me. I believe it didn't warn me of the car and the individuals and nor did it apply brakes."

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Instead, the Tesla smashed into the couple's car at around 70 mph. Benavides died at the scene of the accident and Angulo suffered brain damage and broken bones and still requires care to this day.

The plaintiffs argued that Musk and Tesla had not only massively oversold the capabilities of the Autopilot software, but also made a wrongheaded decision not to geo-lock it to be used only on freeways, which it was designed for, instead allowing it to be used on all roads. The jury seems to have accepted at least part of that argument, finding that Tesla sold the car with a "defect" that was a "legal cause of damage" to the plaintiffs, according to the verdict form, while also finding the driver negligent.

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"It is my professional opinion that Tesla's Autopilot is defective because Tesla knowingly allows the car to be operated in operational domains for which it is explicitly not designed for," testified former National Highway Traffic Safety Administration senior safety advisor Mary Louise "Missy" Cummings. "I believe that they were using that as a way to sell more cars."

When asked about Musk's boast that a Tesla with the systems would "drive safer than a human," she responded, "It wasn’t true then and it isn't true now."

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Not that the human driver of the electric car comes out of this looking good either. Alan Moore, accident reconstruction specialist for the plaintiffs, testified that in the three months before the crash, McGee had received 23 "strikeouts" from the car's Autopilot. These [9]occur when Autopilot fires off multiple audio-visual inattentiveness warnings, then disengages for the rest of that trip. Moore said McGee had nine strikeouts in three hours just five days before the accident.

Concerns from the NHTSA led Tesla to change the strikeout system, so that now when drivers receive three or five strikeouts ( [10]depending on the vehicle's configuration ), Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (Supervised) features will be suspended for one week. Tesla implemented this change through a December 2023 recall and accompanying over-the-air software update.

"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," said Brett Schreiber of Singleton Schreiber, lead attorney for the plaintiffs, in an email.

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"Today's verdict represents justice for Naibel's tragic death and Dillon's lifelong injuries, holding Tesla and Musk accountable for propping up the company’s trillion-dollar valuation with self-driving hype at the expense of human lives."

Tesla plans to appeal the verdict. "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. We plan to appeal, given the substantial errors of law and irregularities at trial," a Tesla spokesperson told The Register .

"Even though this jury found that the driver was overwhelmingly responsible for this tragic accident in 2019, the evidence has always shown that this driver was solely at fault because he was speeding, with his foot on the accelerator – which overrode Autopilot – as he rummaged for his dropped phone without his eyes on the road."

"To be clear, no car in 2019, and none today, would have prevented this crash. This was never about Autopilot; it was a fiction concocted by plaintiffs’ lawyers blaming the car when the driver – from day one – admitted and accepted responsibility."®

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