Miami, (EFE) .- A civil jury ordered Tesla to pay 329 million dollars on Friday by being partially responsible for the death of a woman for an accident in 2019 in Florida that involved a car of the company used by the automatic pilot.
The civil trial in Miami concluded that Tesla is responsible for 33% of the incident in April 2019 in Key Largo, south of Florida, where Naibel Benavides died, 20 years old, and his boyfriend, Dillon Angulo, was injured after the driver, George McGee, crashed after putting the vehicle on the car.
Benavides’ family will receive 59 million dollars in compensation, while the boyfriend will obtain 70 million dollars, in addition to 200 million dollars that the company of the magnate Elon Musk must pay for punitive damage.
The company warned in a pronouncement to the media that the verdict will appeal, for considering it “wrong” and that only serves to “delay automotive security and endanger the efforts of Tesla and the entire industry to develop and implement technology that saves lives.”
But lawyers warned of the transcendence of the trial, for being the first in which Tesla faces a civil jury that considers him responsible for failures in his autopilot system.
The trial adds to the growing pressure facing the Musk company to solve the problems of the highway while increasing the deployment of its robotaxis.
Read; Tesla faces a difficult path ahead while waiting for robotaxis to compensate for sales fall
Benavides’ mother and sister told the press after the trial that they expect a precedent to mark so that “other families do not have to happen the same.”
Tesla argued that he was not responsible because McGee Chocó while looking for his cell phone without paying attention to the road, as the company maintains in its advertising that the autopilot is designed to make the safest driving, but warns drivers who must always keep their hands in the steering wheel.
Angulo and Benavides’ family also accused Tesla of “efforts to obstruct the investigation of the accident”, ensuring that he prevented the Florida road patrol (FHP) “accessing data” of the vehicle that “demonstrates the role of the highway failure in the accident”, according to a judicial document.
The verdict is known after transcending in June that the authorities requested information from Tesla for incidents in the early hours of their Robotaxi testing service in Austin, capital of Texas, where users published videos in which these cars exceed speed limits or circulate in the opposite direction.
And in 2024 the electric vehicle manufacturer reached an agreement to resolve a lawsuit for an accident in California in 2018, in which the driver, Walter Huang, died of one of his semi -automatic vehicles, but the amount he paid was not revealed.
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