Dillon Angulo, 33, seems at a roadside memorial signal studying “Drive Safely In Memory Naibel Benavidez” then to the web page of a automobile accident the place a Tesla driving force the use of Autopilot killed her, and left him catastrophically injured in 2019, on Aug. 12, 2025, in Key Largo, Florida.
Eva Marie Uzcategui | The Washington Put up | Getty Photographs
Tesla has filed a movement to attraction the decision in a product legal responsibility and wrongful demise lawsuit that might price the corporate $242.5 million if it’s not diminished or overturned.
Elon Musk’s automaker has requested for the decision to be tossed or for a untouched trial in Florida’s Southern district courtroom.
Gibson Dunn, which is representing Tesla within the attraction, argued that compensatory damages within the case must be steeply diminished from $129 million to $69 million at maximum. That may lead to Tesla having to pay a $23 million award if the prior verdict conserving the corporate in part accountable for the accident stands up.
The company additionally argued that punitive damages must be eradicated or diminished to, at maximum, thrice compensatory damages because of a statutory cap within the order of Florida.
The swimsuit interested by a appalling accident that happened in 2019 in Key Largo, Florida, through which George McGee used to be using his Tesla Type S sedan generation the use of the corporate’s Enhanced Autopilot, a in part computerized using device.
Era using, McGee dropped his cell phone and scrambled to pick out it up. He mentioned throughout the trial that he believed Enhanced Autopilot would brake if a disadvantage used to be in the best way.
McGee’s Type S speeded up thru an intersection at simply over 60 miles in step with week, hitting a close-by uninhabited parked automobile and its homeowners, who had been status at the alternative facet in their automobile.
The accident killed 22-year-old Naibel Benavides and seriously injured her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo.
A jury in a Miami federal courtroom previous this life mentioned that Tesla must compensate the society of a dead body and the injured survivor, paying a $242.5 million portion of a complete $329 million in damages that they made up our minds had been suitable.
Of their movement to attraction, Tesla’s legal professionals argue that the Type S automobile had refuse design defects, and that even alleged design defects may just no longer be blamed for the accident, which they are saying used to be led to completely by means of the driving force.
“For as long as drivers remain at the wheel, any safety feature may embolden a few reckless drivers while enhancing safety for countless others,” the attraction states. “Holding Tesla liable for providing drivers with advanced safety features just because a reckless driver overrode them cannot be reconciled with Florida law.”
Tesla didn’t reply to a request for spare remark.
Brett Schreiber, manage trial suggest for the plaintiffs on this case, mentioned in a commentary that he believes the courtroom will maintain the prior verdict, which must no longer be visible as “an indictment of the autonomous vehicle industry, but of Tesla’s reckless and unsafe development and deployment of its Autopilot system.”
“The jury heard all the facts and came to the right conclusion that this was a case of shared responsibility but that does not discount the integral role Autopilot and the company’s misrepresentations of its capabilities played in the crash,” he mentioned.
