Tesla asks court to toss wrongful death verdict that cost it $243 million

Lawyers for Tesla filed a motion in court Friday to throw out a jury verdict that found the company’s Autopilot software had contributed to the death of a woman in a crash from 2019.

Earlier this month, a jury found Tesla partially responsible for the death of 22-year-old Naibel Benavides, who was killed by a Model S driver who plowed into her and her boyfriend Dillon Angulo. Tesla was ordered to pay the families of the victims $243 million in compensatory and punitive damages, a stunning outcome for a company that has managed to avoid taking responsibility for crashes involving its partially autonomous software.

In the filing, Tesla’s legal team said the Model S driver bore all the responsibility for the crash. And they are requesting the court invalidate the verdict, or at least order a new jury trial.

“The $243 million judgment against Tesla flies in the face of basic Florida tort law, the Due Process Clause, and common sense,” the company’s lawyers write, noting that McGee had pressed the accelerator to override Autopilot in the seconds before the crash. “Auto manufacturers do not insure the world against harms caused by reckless drivers.”

The lawyers also claim that the plaintiffs should not have been allowed to enter into evidence statements from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has long claimed that the company’s vehicles are capable of higher levels of autonomy than they actually are. And they called claims about data coverup on the part of Tesla — the company was accused of withholding camera data from police investigating the crash — were false and “inflamed” the jury against the company.

The motion was filed by attorneys from Gibson Dunn, a firm that represented Tesla in a lawsuit against a former employee and a tech startup accused of stealing trade secrets for a robotic hand.