Plaintiffs’ appellate brief argues jury’s design-defect, failure-to-warn and punitive damages findings are amply supported by trial record
In a brief filed September 16 with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, attorneys for the family of Naibel Benavides and for Dillon Angulo urged the court to affirm a Florida jury’s verdict finding Tesla, Inc. liable for a 2019 fatal crash involving the company’s Autopilot driver-assistance system, arguing that the trial record overwhelmingly supports the jury’s findings of a design defect, a failure to warn, and gross negligence sufficient to justify $200 million in punitive damages.
The case arises from an April 25, 2019, collision on Card Sound Road, a two-lane roadway connecting Miami to the Florida Keys. According to the brief, George McGee was operating his 2019 Tesla Model S on Autopilot when he looked down to search for a dropped cellphone. According to the appellees’ brief, crash data showed that the vehicle detected a parked SUV, a pedestrian and the end of the road’s drivable space but did not apply automatic emergency braking or issue a forward-collision warning. The brief says Tesla disputed at trial whether a warning occurred. The Tesla struck the parked SUV, which then struck Naibel Benavides and Dillon Angulo. Benavides was killed, and Angulo suffered severe injuries.
Following a fifteen-day trial in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, a jury found that Tesla placed a defective vehicle into the stream of commerce and that the defect was a legal cause of the plaintiffs’ injuries, alongside McGee’s own negligence. The jury allocated 67 percent of responsibility to McGee and 33 percent to Tesla. It awarded $129 million in compensatory damages, with Tesla’s share reduced to approximately $43 million based on the fault allocation, and awarded another $200 million in punitive damages. The district court denied Tesla’s post-trial motions for judgment as a matter of law or a new trial, and Tesla appealed.
Design Defect and Failure-to-Warn Claims
The plaintiffs’ brief contends that trial evidence satisfied both of Florida’s tests for a design defect — the consumer-expectations test and the risk-utility test. It points to statements attributed to Tesla executives, including a 2016 promotional video stating that “the person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons” and remarks by CEO Elon Musk asserting that Tesla vehicles could “drive autonomously with greater safety than a person.” The brief argues those statements set unrealistic consumer expectations that the vehicle’s actual capabilities did not meet.
The brief further identifies what it describes as three specific design defects: Tesla’s failure to restrict Autopilot’s use to roads for which it was designed, an inadequate driver-monitoring system that relied on steering-wheel torque rather than genuine attentiveness, and the absence of automatic braking or a forward collision warning before the crash. The appellees cite NHTSA findings that they say identified a “critical safety gap” in Tesla’s driver-engagement controls and described Tesla as an “industry outlier” in its approach compared with peer systems, some of which used driver-facing cameras or geofencing technology that Tesla did not adopt.
On the failure-to-warn claim, the brief argues Tesla did not adequately disclose the limits of its automatic braking and collision-warning systems in the vehicle’s owner’s manual, and that in-cabin alerts for driver inattention were insufficient. The brief asserts the jury could reasonably have found that better warnings would have prompted McGee to react in time to avoid the collision.
Evidentiary Rulings
The brief also defends three categories of evidence Tesla challenged on appeal. The brief also defends the admission of evidence concerning Tesla’s handling of crash-data files. The appellees contend Tesla failed to produce data that their consultant later recovered, and they argue that evidence concerning the data’s handling was relevant to evaluating conflicting trial testimony. The brief also defends admission of evidence concerning prior Autopilot-related crashes, including incidents in California, Japan and Florida, as relevant to Tesla’s notice of the alleged defects, and it defends the admission of public statements by Musk regarding Autopilot’s capabilities at the time they were made.
Punitive Damages
Addressing the $200 million punitive damages award, the brief argues the evidence was sufficient under Florida’s gross-negligence standard, citing testimony that Tesla did not conduct adequate research on driver complacency before releasing Autopilot and continued selling the technology despite knowledge of prior fatal crashes. The appellees argue that the award satisfies federal due-process requirements, pointing to a roughly 1.55-to-1 ratio between the $200 million punitive award and the jury’s $129 million gross compensatory award. They also contend Florida’s statutory cap should be calculated using the pre-apportionment compensatory award rather than Tesla’s approximately $43 million share after allocation of fault.
The brief was filed on behalf of the plaintiffs by attorneys from Poses Boumel, Singleton Schreiber, Eaton & Wolk PL, and Cooley LLP, including former U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar. The brief asks the Eleventh Circuit to affirm the judgment of the district court in its entirety.
Read the full brief: Benavides v. Tesla — Appellees’ Eleventh Circuit Brief (Sept. 16, 2026)
— The Trial Attorneys Editorial Staff
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