A jury at the Federal Court in Miami has partly found Tesla accusing a 2019 fatal crash that included the use of the company’s automatic pilot aid aid system.
The jury assessed punitive allowances only against Tesla, CNBC reported. The punitive fines combined with compensation allows total payments to about $ 242.5 million.
Neither the driver of the car nor the automatic pilot system fell in time to avoid the junction, where the car hit an SUV and killed a pedestrian. The jury commissioned the driver’s two -thirds of responsibility and attributed one third to Tesla. (The driver was accused separately.)
The verdict comes at the end of a three -week trial for the crash, who killed 20 -year -old Naibel Benavides Leon and seriously injured her friend Dillon Angulo. The verdict is one of the first major legal decisions on aid technology for drivers against Tesla. The company has previously settled lawsuits that includes similar claims for the automatic pilot.
Brett Schreiber, the chief lawyer for the plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement to TechCrunch that Tesla designed an automatic pilot “only for controlled highways, but did not deliberately choose to limit drivers from the use of Elon Musk.
“Tesla’s lies have turned our ways on test routes for their essentially wrong technology, placing everyday Americans such as Naibel Benavides and Dillon Angulo in Harm’s way,” Schreiber said. “Today’s verdict represents justice for the tragic death of Naibel and Dillon’s lifelong injuries, holding Tesla and Musk responsible for supporting the assessment of the company’s trillion dollars with the self-leader.”
Tesla, in a statement provided to TechCrunch, said he plans to appeal to the verdict “given the important errors of law and irregularities in trial”.
“Today’s verdict is wrong and works only to put back the safety of the automotive industry and endanger Tesla and the efforts of the whole industry to grow and implement life technology,” the company writes. “To be clear, no car in 2019, and no one today, would have hindered this crash. This was never for an automatic pilot, it was a fiction created by the lawyers of the plaintiffs who accused the car when the driver – from day one – admitted and accepted.”
Tesla and Musk have spent years of claims on Autopilot’s capabilities that led to excessive confidence in the driver’s help system, a reality that government officials – and Musk himself – have spoken for years.
The National Transport Security Council (NTSB) came to this determination in 2020 after investigating a 2018 crash, where the driver died after hitting a concrete barrier. This driver, Walter Huang, were Playing a mobile game while using an automatic pilot. NTSB made some recommendations after this research, which Tesla was largely ignoredthe The Security Council requested later.
At a 2018 teleconference, Musk said that “complacency” with driver help systems such as Autopilot is a problem.
“They just get used to it. This tends to be more an issue. It is not the lack of understanding of what this pilot can do. Is [drivers] believing that they know more about the automatic pilot than they do, “musk said at that time.
The trial took place at a time when Tesla is currently in the middle of the release of the first editions of the long -term Robotaxi network, starting from Austin, Texas. These vehicles use an improved version of the most capable Tesla driver aid system, which calls for complete self-guide.
Update: This story has been informed to include the amount of compensatory allowances in total.
