Jury orders Tesla to pay $243M in deadly Autopilot crash case

A federal jury in Miami has found Tesla partly liable for a 2019 crash in Key Largo, Florida, that killed 22-year-old Naibel Benavides Leon and severely injured her boyfriend. The crash occurred when driver George McGee, distracted by a dropped cell phone, ran a stop sign at 62 mph while relying heavily on Tesla’s Autopilot system, which failed to warn or brake automatically. The jury ordered Tesla to pay $243 million in damages, marking a rare legal defeat for the company amid its efforts to launch a driverless taxi service. Tesla plans to appeal the verdict, maintaining that McGee’s reckless behavior was solely to blame and emphasizing its repeated warnings for drivers to stay attentive. Plaintiffs’ lawyers argued that Tesla enabled reckless use of Autopilot by not restricting its operation on unsuitable roads and failing to disengage the system when drivers were distracted. They also accused Tesla of misleading customers through branding and withholding or losing critical crash data, which was later recovered by