Blow to Elon Musk as US court refuses to scrap $243 million payout ruling in Tesla autopilot crash case
A federal judge has rejected Tesla’s request to cancel $243 million in payments to victims of a fatal 2019 crash involving an Autopilot-equipped Model S, according to a report by Reuters.
U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom in Miami said in a decision made public Friday that the evidence presented at trial “equivalently supported” the jury’s verdict, adding that Tesla had not advanced any new arguments to overturn the verdict.
The decision comes after Tesla filed a petition last August to appeal the decision in its product liability and wrongful death case. The Elon Musk-led automaker sought to overturn the decision or get a new trial in Florida’s Southern district court, CNBC previously reported.
How much is Tesla expected to pay?
In August 2025, a jury awarded the victims a total of $329 million in damages, including $129 million in compensatory damages and $200 million in punitive damages aimed at deterring Tesla from similar behavior in the future.
But Gibson Dunn, the law firm that represented Tesla in the appeal, argued that compensatory damages in the case should be sharply reduced from $129 million to $69 million. CNBC reported.
In addition, the firm argued that punitive damages should either be vacated entirely or reduced to no more than three times compensatory damages, citing Florida’s statutory limit on such damages.
In the appeal, Tesla’s lawyers argued that the Model S vehicle had no design defects and that even if such defects were alleged, they could not have caused the crash. The company claims that the accident was caused entirely by driver error.
What caused the accident and who were the victims?
In the fatal accident that occurred in the Key Largo region of Florida in 2019, 22-year-old Naibel Benavides died and her boyfriend Dillon Angulo was seriously injured. CNBC reported.
The driver was identified as George McGee, who was operating his Tesla Model S sedan with the Enhanced Autopilot system, the company’s partially automatic driver-assistance feature, engaged.
McGee dropped his cell phone while driving and hurriedly bent over to pick it up. Later at the hearing, he testified that he believed the Advanced Autopilot system would automatically brake if it detected an obstacle in his path.
However, the Model S went through an intersection at just over 60 mph, hitting a parked car and striking the owners standing on the other side of their car.
A jury in Miami federal court previously said in August that Tesla must compensate the family of the dead and injured survivor and pay $242.5 million of the $329 million in total damages, which they determined were appropriate, CNBC reported.
