Tesla asked the judge to file a $243 million ruling against the company in a lawsuit that includes an autopilot system or allow a new trial, according to a new court filing.
The company’s lawyers argue that the verdict made by the ju judge earlier this month “fly in the face of basic Florida tort laws, due process clauses and common sense.” This latest submission by Tesla’s lawyers attempts to give driver George McGee one more break from all responsibility for causing the crash.
The ju judge in the case ultimately decided that the driver deserves two-thirds of responsibility, with one-third attributing Tesla.
The famous case focuses on the 2019 crash in Florida. McGee drove Tesla models at night and used the company’s autopilot driver assistance system. This is a system that is less capable than more fully functional “fully autonomous driving (supervisor)” software. In both systems, the driver must place his hand on the wheel.
Neither McGee nor the autopilot system applied the brakes as he approached the vertically parked SUV. McGee’s car blows a stop sign, hits an SUV, killing 20-year-old Naibel Benavides Leon and seriously injured her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo.
McGee was sued separately and settled with the victim. This week we learned that Tesla had rejected a $60 million settlement offer from the victim a few months before the sentence was handed out.
In a new filing, Tesla’s attorneys argue that the Product Liability Act is supposed to punish cars for “performing in a way that is at risk or unfairly dangerous to the expectations of ordinary consumers.”
TechCrunch Events
San Francisco
|
October 27th-29th, 2025
“That’s not this case, it’s just a little,” they wrote. They say McGee’s “extraordinary recklessness” is to blame him as a fact he admitted in his own case, as he reached for his phone when the crash occurred.
They argue that “thwarts innovation, disrupts consumer expectations, and leads manufacturers to abandon enhanced safety in fear of being subjected to massive punishment when drivers misuse their products.”
Tesla’s lawyer also took a shot at the other side of the filing, claiming that he “overwhelmed this ju apprentice with a flood of highly unbiased but unrelated evidence about data storage, Elon Musk, and a different accident.”
“The plaintiff’s lawyers assured that the trial was not in fact related to an accident caused by the reckless driving of the 2019 Tesla Model S or McGee,” they wrote.
“The motion is the latest example of a complete disregard for the human costs of Tesla and Mask’s defective technology,” said Brett Schreiber, the plaintiff’s chief attorney, in an email.
“The ju umpire heard all the facts and came to the right conclusion that this is an example of shared responsibility, but it doesn’t discount the company’s misrepresentation of capabilities that took place in the crash that killed Naibel and permanently injured Dillon,” Schreiber continued in an email. “We are confident that the court will support this verdict, which accuses Tesla of reckless and unsafe development and the deployment of autopilot systems, not as a prosecution of the autonomous vehicle industry.”
Article updated to include a statement from the plaintiff’s lead lawyer, Brett Schreiber.
