Lawsuit against Tesla goes to trial in Florida : NPR

George McGee was behind the wheel of his Tesla Model S in April 2019 when the car sped through a T intersection near Key Largo, Fla., crashing into a parked SUV at more than 50 miles per hour.

“I was driving, I dropped my phone, and looked down,” McGee told police at the scene. “I ran the stop sign and hit the guy’s car.”

Before the crash, McGee had engaged the system that Tesla calls Autopilot, which can steer, brake and accelerate the car on its own.

But that didn’t stop the Tesla from slamming into the parked Chevrolet Tahoe. The impact of the crash killed 22-year-old Naibel Benavides Leon, who had been standing next to the parked SUV with Dillon Angulo. Angulo was severely injured, while Benavides’s body was found about 75 feet away.

More than six years later, a lawsuit brought by Angulo and the Benavides family is set for a federal jury trial starting Monday in Miami. The plaintiffs have already reached a settlement with the driver.

This is one of many lawsuits against Tesla that question the safety of the company’s driver-assistance systems, and accuse the company of exaggerating their capabilities. But few of these cases have actually gone to trial, with Tesla often settling claims outside the courtroom.

An undated family photo of Naibel Benavides Leon, who was 22 years old when she was killed in the 2019 crash.

Courtesy of Benavides family

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Courtesy of Benavides family

Tesla insists its cars are safe as long as drivers remain attentive. When used correctly, the company argues, its driver-assistance technology is preventing crashes and saving lives.

Federal safety regulators have opened multiple investigations into Tesla’s driver-assistance systems, including Autopilot and a more sophisticated system known as Full Self-Driving (Supervised).

Lawyers for the plaintiffs accuse the company of overpromising what its technology can do in order to sell cars.

“Tesla advertised Autopilot in a way that greatly exaggerated its capabilities and hid its deficiencies,” they say in court filings, “encouraging Tesla drivers to over-rely on its Autopilot system.”

Tesla denies that allegation.

The company’s website warns that Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (Supervised) are “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.”

But Tesla has also made bolder claims about what its technology can do. In 2016, the company posted a video of what appears to be a car equipped with Autopilot driving on its own.

“The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons,” reads a caption that flashes at the beginning of the video. “He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.” (Six years later, a senior Tesla engineer conceded as part of a separate lawsuit that the video was staged and did not represent the true capabilities of the car.)

Tesla’s lawyers asked a federal judge to dismiss the wrongful death lawsuit filed after the 2019 crash in Florida. But U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom denied their request.

In allowing the case to proceed, Bloom wrote that “a reasonable jury could find that Tesla acted in reckless disregard of human life for the sake of developing their product and maximizing profit.”

Tesla did not reply to NPR’s request for a comment.

But the company has discussed the incident on X, the social media platform owned by Tesla CEO Elon Musk. In a post from 2023, the company says that the driver of the car, George McGee, has acknowledged responsibility for the crash. And the company defended its driver-assistance systems.

“The data strongly indicates our customers are far safer by having the choice to decide when it is appropriate to engage Autopilot features. When used properly, it provides safety benefits on all road classes,” the company wrote.

Musk has publicly defended Tesla’s safety record too.

“Human driving is not perfect,” Musk said at a shareholder meeting last June, noting that roughly 40,000 people are killed every year on U.S. roadways. “What matters is, like, are we making that number smaller? And as long as we’re making that number smaller, we’re doing the right thing,” Musk said.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs in the Florida case also accuse Tesla of withholding data produced by the Tesla Model S during the crash, which the company denies.

“Tesla’s had this data all along,” they told the judge last year, “and they have engaged in a scheme to hide it from us.”

A lawyer for Tesla denied that, telling the court that the company was not deliberately concealing data from the plaintiffs.

The jury trial is scheduled to last three weeks.