Jury Awards $329 Million in Fatal Tesla Autopilot Crash

Tesla electric vehicles are parked at a port in Yokohama, Japan, last month. (Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images)

A Miami jury ordered $329 million in damages for a fatal 2019 crash involving Tesla’s Autopilot software.

That includes $200 million in punitive damages and $129 million in compensatory damages, according to multiple media reports. The crash killed a 22-year-old woman and severely injured her partner.

A Tesla spokesperson said the company is responsible for one-third of the compensatory damages and a maximum of three times that in punitive damages. That means its bill for compensatory damages will be about $42.5 million, while it would pay up to about $127 million in punitive damages, for a potential total of some $170 million.

The jury determined that Tesla was 33% responsible for the crash, and blamed the driver for the remainder, the New York Times reported.

“Today’s verdict is wrong and only works to set back automotive safety and jeopardize Tesla’s and the entire industry’s efforts to develop and implement life-saving technology,” a Tesla spokesperson said. The company plans to appeal.

The spokesperson said that while the jury found that while the driver was “overwhelmingly” responsible, the evidence showed he was solely at fault because he was speeding, with his foot on the accelerator, which overrode Autopilot, “as he rummaged for his dropped phone without his eyes on the road.”

Tesla’s Model S, the vehicle involved in the fatal incident, had been deemed among the cars with the “lowest overall probability of injury of any vehicles ever tested by the U.S. government’s New Car Assessment Program,” according to Tesla’s second-quarter 2025 vehicle safety report.

In 2024, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched a probe into Tesla’s Full Self Driving technology after four of its vehicles were involved in accidents—a pedestrian was killed in one instance—in areas with limited visibility as a result of sun glare, fog, or airborne dust.

Tesla, however, has avoided civil trials involving its driver-assistance technology, although it settled lawsuits concerning the technology both this year and in 2024, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Carl Tobias, Williams chair at the University of Richmond School of Law, said that because a jury was involved in this case, which he said doesn’t normally happen, the decision would be difficult to overturn.

“It shows that people can win these cases if they assemble them properly and there are problems with the technology,” he told Barron’s. “[Tesla’s] representations about how good the technology is are strong, but sometimes they may be overstated or the jury may find that something didn’t work properly.”

The verdict comes after CEO Elon Musk announced Thursday the company had started offering a ride-hailing service in the San Francisco Bay Area. Musk, however, didn’t call it a robo-taxi service; the auto maker holds a license to test self-driving cars with a safety driver in California.

Tesla did launch a robo-taxi service on June 22 in Austin, Texas. It deployed a group of Model Y sport-utility vehicles integrated with FSD software with a human safety monitor in the front passenger seat.

Shares fell 1.8% at Friday’s market close, while the S&P 500 fell 1.6%. Tesla stock has plunged about 25% this year.

Corrections & Amplifications: Tesla is responsible for one-third of the $129 million in compensatory damages the jury ordered, and a maximum of three times that $42.5 million in punitive damages. That brings its total cost to a maximum of about $170 million. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said the jury ordered Tesla to pay the full $129 million in compensatory damages and $200 million in punitive damages, for a total cost of $329 million.

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