Tesla turned down a $60 million settlement offer before a jury ultimately ordered it to pay $243 million in damages over a fatal Autopilot crash in Florida. The incident, which happened in 2019, involved a Model S that struck two people standing beside a parked SUV, killing 22-year-old Naibel Benavides Leon and leaving her boyfriend Dillon Angulo seriously injured.
Court filings revealed that the settlement offer was made on May 30 2025, but Tesla rejected it. The case then went to trial, where jurors awarded $129 million in compensatory damages and $200 million in punitive damages. Of the compensatory damages, Tesla was found 33 percent liable, or about $42.6 million, while the remaining 67 percent was assigned to the driver, who was not a legal defendant. The company was held fully responsible for the punitive portion. According to Reuters, Tesla has denied wrongdoing and says it plans to appeal.
This trial marked the first wrongful-death lawsuit involving a third-party victim of Autopilot to make it to a courtroom. Earlier cases were either dismissed or quietly settled, meaning this verdict could set a precedent for how future litigation involving automated driving systems is handled. For Tesla, the result is not only a financial setback but also a reputational one, as it faces increasing criticism over how Autopilot is marketed and used by drivers.
The company has long promoted Autopilot as a sophisticated safety system, but critics argue that drivers often overestimate its capabilities, treating it more like full self-driving technology. That gap between perception and reality may have influenced jurors, who delivered one of the largest punitive damage awards tied to an automotive crash.
Beyond Tesla, the ruling sends a message to the entire self-driving industry. Companies developing advanced driver assistance systems will need to weigh how they describe these features and how much responsibility they bear when drivers misuse them. Regulators are also likely to pay closer attention to the safety claims made in advertisements and owner manuals.
For Tesla, the appeal process may reduce the final payout, but the case has already put pressure on the company’s narrative around Autopilot. As the industry moves toward increasingly automated driving, balancing innovation with accountability is becoming a central challenge – and this verdict shows that juries are prepared to hold automakers to account when the technology fails in real-world scenarios.