Florida couple Dillon Angulo and Naibel Benavides Leon were stargazing alongside a Key Largo road in 2019 when a Tesla Model S blew past a stop sign and a flashing red light at a three-way intersection and plowed into a parked SUV.
Benavides Leon, 22, was killed and Angulo was seriously injured.
The Tesla’s driver, George McGee, had Autopilot mode engaged at the time. He later said he had dropped his cell phone during a call and bent down to pick it up moments before his Tesla — without warning — T-boned Angulo’s mother’s Chevrolet Tahoe at about 60-miles-per-hour, according to court papers.
“Oh my God, I wasn’t looking,” McGee told a 911 operator after the April 25, 2019, crash, a judge’s ruling said. “I looked down and I’ve been using cruise control.”
Is Tesla and its Autopilot driver-assist system, which allows the vehicle to steer itself, switch lanes, brake, and accelerate on its own, to blame for the deadly collision?
A Miami federal jury will soon consider that in a civil trial set to open Monday in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
Benavides Leon’s family said in court filings that the impact of the crash threw the young woman about 75 feet.
At the trial, which is expected to last about three weeks, Tesla’s safety features will once again come under the microscope. The electric-car company headed by billionaire Elon Musk could ultimately be ordered to pay out steep monetary damages if a jury finds it liable in the crash.
Lawyers for Tesla didn’t immediately return a request for comment by Business Insider for this story, while attorneys for Benavides Leon’s family and Angulo declined to comment.
Judge said a reasonable jury could find Tesla acted recklessly
Benavides Leon’s estate initially sued Tesla over the crash in 2021 in Florida state court before the case was moved to federal court.
In March 2024, Benavides Leon’s estate and Angulo filed an amended wrongful death complaint against Tesla, arguing in court papers that Tesla’s vehicles were “defective and unsafe for their intended use.”
Tesla, the lawsuit said, programmed Autopilot “to allow it to be used on roadways that Tesla knew were not suitable for its use and knew this would result in collisions causing injuries and deaths of innocent people who did not choose to be a part of Tesla’s experiments, such as Plaintiffs.”
“Despite knowing of Autopilot’s deficiencies, Tesla advertised Autopilot in a way that greatly exaggerated its capabilities and hid its deficiencies,” said the lawsuit, which pointed to multiple comments from Musk touting the safety and reliability of the software.
US District Judge Beth Bloom, who is overseeing the case, said last month in a 98-page order that the plaintiff’s lawsuit can move ahead on design defect and failure to warn claims against Tesla. Bloom, however, sided with Tesla on the suit’s claims of manufacturing defect and negligent misrepresentation and dismissed them.
Additionally, the judge ruled that the plaintiffs can seek punitive damages at trial.
“A reasonable jury could find that Tesla acted in reckless disregard of human life for the sake of developing their product and maximizing profit,” Bloom wrote in her order.
Bloom said in her decision that the plaintiffs provided enough evidence “affording a reasonable basis to conclude that, more likely than not, a defect in the Autopilot system was a substantial factor” in the victims’ injuries.
Tesla’s attorneys have argued in court papers that McGee was solely responsible for the crash and that the collision could have been avoided by an “attentive driver.”
The company says on its website that Autopilot mode is “intended for use with a fully attentive driver, who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment.”
“While these features are designed to become more capable over time, the currently enabled features do not make the vehicle autonomous,” it says.
Although Autopilot is designed to detect vehicles and obstacles, Tesla adds on its website that it is a driver’s “responsibility to always perform visual checks to make sure it is safe and appropriate to move into the target lane.”
The judge said in her ruling that while McGee, who is not a defendant in the lawsuit, conceded that he was responsible for operating his 2019 Tesla “safely and failed to do so, that does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that he alone is responsible for the resulting collision, particularly given McGee’s testimony that he expected Autopilot to avoid the collision.”
Benavides Leon’s estate and Angulo, the judge wrote, “have adequately demonstrated that Autopilot’s design led Tesla drivers, and McGee in particular, to become complacent and over rely on Autopilot to operate their vehicles.”
McGee said in his deposition that he thought of Autopilot as a “copilot” and believed it would keep him in the lane, avoid crashes and direct him where he needed to go, according to Bloom’s ruling. McGee previously settled a separate lawsuit with the plaintiffs.
Tesla sued several times over its Autopilot software
In recent years, Tesla has faced multiple lawsuits over its Autopilot driver-assist software and has come under increased scrutiny from regulators regarding the technology.
The carmaker, however, won two lawsuits in 2023 involving crashes where Autopilot was in use.
In one case — the first US trial over accusations that Tesla’s Autopilot was responsible for a fatal crash — a California state jury found that Tesla was not liable for the 2019 incident that killed Tesla Model 3 owner, Micha Lee, and injured two passengers.
An attorney for Tesla argued at the trial that “classic human error” caused Lee’s vehicle to veer off a highway. “Autopilot makes a road safer. It is a good thing,” the lawyer said.
Last year, Tesla settled a wrongful-death lawsuit brought by the family of Apple engineer Walter Huang, who was killed in a 2018 fiery wreck when his Tesla Model X SUV smashed into a concrete barrier on a California highway as the vehicle was in Autopilot mode.
The case was settled for an undisclosed amount at the 11th hour, just before jury selection in the trial was set to begin.
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