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A Tesla Autopilot trial is underway in Miami where a federal jury will decide if Naibel Benavides Leon was killed as the result of defects in a 2019 Tesla Model S.
Tesla driver George McGee purchased his 2019 Tesla Model S in early 2019. On April 25, 2019, McGee was driving his Tesla a few miles from his home when the crash occurred at a ‘T’ intersection on Card Sound Road in Key Largo, Florida.
The lawsuit says Card Sound Road is a “two-lane undivided rural road, with unpaved shoulders and drop-offs in places, several curves, and no roadside lighting for most of the road.” Additionally, pedestrians often use the road and vehicles are often “stopped on the roadside.”
McGee says he activated Tesla’s Autopilot system before he reached the intersection of Card Sound Road, including the Traffic Aware Cruise Control which he says restricts the speed to 45 miles per hour when the Tesla is not operating on a highway or limited access roadway.
However, McGee subsequently manually engaged the Model S accelerator which increased the speed to 62 miles per hour, temporarily disengaging the 45 mph speed restriction.
The lawsuit alleges this still left certain Autopilot features operational, but the parties dispute which specific Autopilot features remained active once McGee pressed the accelerator pedal. A big issue is the disagreement whether Autopilot’s longitudinal control function and the automatic emergency brake function were deactivated in the moments leading up to the fatal crash.
According to the lawsuit, as McGee continued driving toward the Card Sound Road intersection, he dropped his cell phone on the Model S floorboard and immediately reached down to pick up his phone.
While McGee was reaching for his phone, the Tesla Model S allegedly “detected a stop sign, a stop bar, the road’s edge, a pedestrian, and a parked Chevrolet Tahoe, but the Vehicle did not provide McGee with any audio alert or other warning of the obstacles and never engaged its emergency brakes.”
Because McGee also failed to observe the traffic signs and “obstacles,” McGee drove through the intersection, failing to brake before hitting the side of the parked Tahoe, “which in turn was pushed into two pedestrians”— killing Decedent Naibel Benavides Leon and seriously injuring Dillon Angulo.”
Shortly after the crash, McGee called 911 and told the operator: “Oh my God, I wasn’t looking,” “I don’t know what happened. I ended up missing the turn. I was looking down,” and “I dropped my phone. Oh my God.”
McGee told responding officers, “I was driving. I dropped my phone and looked down and I ran the stop sign and hit the guy’s car.” McGee told officers, “[i]t was actually because I was driving [ ]. I looked down and I’ve been using cruise control, and I looked down, I didn’t realize (INAUDIBLE) and then I [ ] sat up. The minute I sat up[,] I hit the brakes and saw his truck.”
McGee further said the road “signs were visible if he had looked up” and “that, had he been watching the road, [he would have] had a clear and unobstructed view of the ‘T’ intersection for a ‘long distance’—at least 1,000 feet.” According to McGee, “there was nothing that prevented him from acting to prevent the crash.”
McGee also told the officers he “was driving on cruise going for – and [he] looked down [ ] – to get the phone [he] dropped … [then he] reached down . . . And then when [he] popped up and looked, [he] saw a black truck. It just happened so fast.”
Mr. McGee is not named as a defendant in the Tesla lawsuit.
Judge Allows Lawsuit to Reach Trial
Although the Tesla driver described how the crash occurred, the only reason the lawsuit reached trial is because Judge Beth Bloom believed some of the allegations and allowed the case to proceed.
According to the lawsuit, Tesla failed to warn the driver about the Autopilot system.
The plaintiffs admit the Model S owner’s manual clearly warns that Autopilot “(1) is primarily intended for driving on dry, straight roads, such as highways and freeways; (2) should not be used on city streets; [and] (3) should not be used on winding roads with sharp curves, on icy or slippery road surfaces[.]”
But the judge said a driver may have a difficult time reading the Autopilot warnings from the owner’s manual on the Model S touchscreen.
Judge Bloom also found the Tesla driver may not have known he shouldn’t have trusted Autopilot as he apparently did, and the judge also had issues with calling the system Autopilot.
“The term ‘Autopilot’ itself is a potentially confusing term as it arguably implies to the user that the 2019 Model S was more autonomous or at least had more capabilities than it really did.” — Judge Bloom
The judge made the decision to see the Autopilot warnings as more like “instructions” instead of warnings, and the judge ruled the design of Autopilot caused drivers to “become complacent and over rely on Autopilot to operate their vehicles.”
The judge also ruled Tesla can face punitive damages because “a reasonable jury could find that Tesla acted in reckless disregard of human life for the sake of developing their product and maximizing profit.”
Punitive damages are for one reason, and that is to punish an automaker for wrongdoing according to a jury. Ask Ford what a jury can do regarding punitive damages after a jury awarded a family $1.7 billion following a Ford truck roof collapse rollover crash trial.
Then a separate roof collapse trial led to a jury awarding a family $2.5 billion in a roof collapse wrongful death lawsuit.
The Tesla / Naibel Benavides Leon lawsuit was originally filed April 22, 2021, in the Circuit Court for Miami-Dade County, Florida, but later removed to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, Case No. 21-cv-21940-BLOOM/Torres.
The case is Neima Benavides, as Personal Representative of the Estate of Naibel Benavides Leon, deceased, v. Tesla, Inc., a/k/a. Tesla Florida, Inc.
Plaintiff Dillon Angulo filed a separate products liability lawsuit against Tesla in August 2022, but that lawsuit was added to the original lawsuit because of the overlapping issues.
The plaintiffs are represented by Singleton Schreiber LLP, Poses & Poses PA, and Eaton & Wolk PL.