Tesla’s $243 Million Autopilot Verdict Reveals a Glaring Flaw
The decision over a fatal 2019 crash is a rebuke of how the company markets its driver assistance technology.
Eyes on the road.
Photographer: Jasper Juinen/Bloomberg
A Miami jury just found for the humans. The $243 million of damages levied against Tesla Inc. over a fatal Autopilot crash in 2019 represent a black eye for a company that has often successfully blamed human error in prior accidents. It will hopefully be more than that: an impetus to fix a glaring flaw in the drive for ever more automated vehicles.
An unusual aspect of this case, Benavides v. Tesla, was that the driver admitted he was at fault, having sped through a stop sign while searching for a dropped cellphone, killing Naibel Benavides Leon and seriously injuring her boyfriend as they stood next to their parked SUV. The jury did indeed blame the distracted driver but assigned him only two-thirds of that blame. The rest was laid on Tesla. Not only must it pay its share of compensatory damages to the victims, amounting to about $43 million, but also $200 million of punitive damages.