A jury in federal court in Miami has found Tesla partly to blame for a fatal 2019 crash that involved the use of the company’s Autopilot driver assistance system. The jury awarded the plaintiffs $200 million in punitive damages, along with “compensatory damages for pain and suffering,” according to NBC News.
Neither the driver of the car nor the Autopilot system braked in time to avoid going through an intersection, where the car struck an SUV and killed a pedestrian. The jury assigned the driver two-thirds of the blame, and attributed one-third to Tesla. (The driver was sued separately.)
The verdict comes at the end of a three-week trial over the crash, which killed 20-year-old Naibel Benavides Leon and severely injured her boyfriend Dillon Angulo. It’s one of the first major legal decisions about driver assistance technology that has gone against Tesla.
This story is developing…
