by Ian Carlos Campbell from Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics on (#6Z22D)
A jury in Florida has found Tesla partially liable for a 2019 crash involving the company's Autopilot self-driving feature, The Washington Post reports. As a result, the company will have to pay $43 million in compensatory damages and even more in punitive damages.Autopilot comes pre-installed on Tesla's cars and handles things like collision detection and emergency braking. Tesla has mostly avoided taking responsibility for crashes involving cars with the Autopilotenabled, but the Florida case played out differently. The jury ultimately decided that the self-driving tech enabled driver George McGee to take his eyes off the road and hit a couple, Naibel Benavides Leon and Dillon Angulo, ultimately killing one and severely injuring the other.During the case, Tesla's lawyers argued that McGee's decision to take his eyes off the road to reach for his phone was the cause of the crash, and that Autopilot shouldn't be considered. The plaintiffs, Angulo and Benevides Leon's family, argued that the way Tesla and Elon Musk talked about the feature ultimately created the illusion that Autopilot was safer than it really was. "My concept was that it would assist me should I have a failure ... or should I make a mistake," McGee said on the stand. "And in that case I feel like it failed me." The jury ultimately assigned two-thirds of the responsibility to McGee and a third to Tesla, according to NBC News.When reached for comment, Tesla said it would appeal the decision and gave the following statement: