Attorneys for Tesla blasted last month’s $242.5 million jury verdict that found Elon Musk’s electric car company partly to blame for a 2019 deadly crash in Florida, arguing in court papers that the massive judgment should be tossed.
“The $243 million judgment against Tesla flies in the face of basic Florida tort law, the Due Process Clause, and common sense,” Tesla lawyers wrote in a motion filed in a Miami federal court on Friday.
The attorneys argued that if the verdict is allowed to stand, “it will chill innovation, harm road safety, and invite future juries to punish manufacturers who bring new safety features to market with sweeping and unpredictable tort liability.”
The car company maintained in the court papers that the “reckless” driver of the Tesla 2019 Model S — and not its Autopilot software — was entirely responsible for the Key Largo crash that left a 22-year-old woman dead and her boyfriend seriously injured.
“Auto manufacturers do not insure the world against harms caused by reckless drivers,” Tesla’s attorney wrote in the 98-page motion, adding, “For as long as there have been cars, there have been reckless, self-absorbed drivers like” George McGee.
In a major blow to Tesla last month, the Florida jury sided with the plaintiffs, awarding the family of Naibel Benavides Leon and her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo, a combined $329 million in total damages — $129 million in compensatory damages and $200 million in punitive damages.
The jury found Tesla 33% responsible for the crash, with McGee, the driver, responsible for the rest. As a result of the verdict, Tesla was ordered to pay the full punitive damages amount and a third of the compensatory damages, which comes to $42.5 million. That leaves Tesla on the hook for $242.5 million.
The verdict marked a huge defeat for Tesla and its Autopilot driver-assistance feature that the attorneys for the plaintiffs said was engaged at the time of the deadly collision and had design flaws.
McGee — who previously settled a separate lawsuit with the plaintiffs for an undisclosed amount — said he had dropped his cellphone during a call and bent down to pick it up moments before his Tesla, without warning, T-boned the SUV that Benavides Leon and Angulo had been standing outside.
Tesla is now arguing that the verdict should be thrown out, drastically cut, or the court should order a new trial.
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Attorneys for the automaker argued that the plaintiff’s lawyers “overwhelmed” the jury during the three-week trial with “a flood of highly prejudicial but irrelevant evidence” involving data preservation, Musk — Tesla’s CEO — and “dissimilar accidents.”
Lawyers for the family of Benavides Leon and Angulo focused “extensively” at trial on the “irrelevant issue of Tesla’s handling of data from McGee’s vehicle after the accident, even though their own experts confirmed that the relevant data had not actually been deleted or corrupted, and in fact had provided them with a tremendous amount of valuable information,” Tesla’s motion says.
The trial, Tesla’s attorneys argued, was also “tainted by Plaintiffs’ misuse of numerous irrelevant and prejudicial statements” by Musk.
The lawsuit that the plaintiffs filed against Tesla pointed to multiple comments from Musk touting the safety and reliability of the Autopilot software.
McGee testified during the trial that he thought of Autopilot, which allows the vehicle to steer itself, switch lanes, brake, and accelerate on its own, as a “copilot.”
Tesla’s appellate lawyer Theodore Boutrous of the firm Gibson Dunn told Business Insider in a statement Tuesday that “unfounded and unconstitutional verdicts like this one against Tesla pose real dangers to safety innovation and technological advancement, creating perverse incentives for manufacturers by discouraging new safety enhancements.”
“This verdict is a true outlier given the facts and law and we look forward to setting things right,” Boutrous said.
The plaintiffs’ attorney, Brett Schreiber, told Business Insider in a statement that Tesla’s motion “is the latest example of Tesla and Musk’s complete disregard for the human cost of their defective technology.”
“We are confident the court will uphold this verdict, which serves not as an indictment of the autonomous vehicle industry, but of Tesla’s reckless and unsafe development and deployment of its Autopilot system,” said Schreiber.
