I led the first jury victory against Tesla’s Autopilot. I can only take cases with ‘catastrophic’ injuries.

This as-told essay is based on three conversations with Brett Schreiber, a California-based attorney who represented the plaintiffs in the case Miami Autopilot case involving Naibel Benavides Leon. In 2025, a federal jury found Tesla partially responsible for the crash that killed Benavides Leon and seriously injured Dillon Angulo. The jury ordered Tesla to pay more than $242.5 million in damages. Tesla will appeal the verdict. Tesla and its attorney did not respond to requests for comment. The conversations have been edited for length and clarity.

I have been a lawyer in California since 2005.

I joined a civil plaintiffs’ litigation firm in San Diego and had the opportunity to work on and try serious injury cases.

Around 2021 I started getting calls about it Tesla crashes. At the time, I had a GED-level education in autonomous vehicles, but that already put me head and shoulders above many of my contemporaries.

Now my company has weekly meetings called “Tesla Autopilot Review Team” and I get dozens of calls a month from all over the country about incidents involving Autopilot or Full self-driving modes.

The vast majority of them are minor or modest injuries that I simply cannot assess. The barrier to entry due to the legal costs is so high.

In the Miami case, I spent over a million dollars on legal costs alone – not including fees, but experts, depositions, data work and everything else. I am a contingency lawyer. The math on that has to be a $10+ million thing to make sense.

So we have to limit the cases we look at to those that involve catastrophic injury or, unfortunately, loss of life.

For someone who is minimally injured: great for him, bad for his lawsuit. Ultimately, the courthouse doors are closed to most of those people.

The Benavides case

The Benavides case was always about shared responsibility. We never tried to frame it as anything other than that.

In each of these Tesla Autopilot suitcasesthere is usually a driver who has committed the error. Someone did something wrong. Someone has failed to be an alert and attentive driver. However, that should not absolve Tesla.

Tesla’s frame had to focus on the last three seconds: what was the driver doing? What haven’t they done? Which systems were on? Which systems were turned off?

My role was to make it something bigger. Accidents happen, but systemic failures are caused by choices. If I made this thing around the last three seconds, I would lose.

We cannot change the facts about the driver’s behavior. We’ve talked about it. But we also argued that Tesla was making decisions for years before the collision—decisions to exaggerate, overhype, and oversell this technology, which led to people over-relying on it just like this driver.

So suddenly it’s not just about the driver’s actions. What this driver did became inevitable, and that inevitability exists because of the choices Tesla made.

There is no playbook for AV lawsuits

In the world of automotive product liability, such as a tire blowout case or a seat roll case, there is a playbook of sorts. This means that many of the same experts are involved. Tests have been done.

In autonomous vehicle technologyUntil last year there was no script.

The Benavides trial in Miami was only the third case ever tried against Tesla, and the first time the plaintiffs won. We are in the early stages of these types of lawsuits. We build the plane as we fly it.

In the last half century of lawsuits over automotive product defects, you could usually point to a mechanical failure mechanism. A bolt failed, a hose came loose, or a backrest bolt was not properly tightened, resulting in the chair folding like a beach chair.

If there is a defect here, it exists in the software. There is usually no mechanical fingerprint, no witness mark showing how the system failed. All this is algorithmic. All this lives in a world of ones and zeros.

The challenge is to turn algorithmic decision-making into something we can discover and explain to jurors so they can understand how and why these crashes happened.

Sometimes it is one failed camera merger. Sometimes it is a defect in the automatic emergency braking system or the forward collision warning. Sometimes a system activates in a place where it shouldn’t be.

I don’t need Tesla’s source code to understand when a camera fusion error occurs. If three cameras focus on a subject and all three interpret it differently, I can show a jury that none of them agreed and there was no decision maker.

The updates leave behind a glaring problem

There are still many Tesla vehicles on the road today that use this cameras and radar for the sensors.

People bought these vehicles over the last decade with the idea or promise that they would get to a point where they would be fully self-driving and completely autonomous.

Elon Musk only recently said that not all Teslas will operate fully autonomously.

[In April, Musk said older Teslas with the Hardware 3 computer could not achieve unsupervised FSD without a hardware upgrade.]

Tesla has tried to push out over-the-air updates. We’ve seen in a number of areas that that’s like trying to update an iPhone 17 and make it compatible with an iPhone 4. There are computer limitations.

Flash forward: we are now starting to see problems with the camera only system.

[There is a current National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigation into Tesla’s “degradation detection system.” A filing from NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation shows that the department is examining whether the system properly detects when conditions such as glare degrade camera visibility and warns drivers in time to respond.]

I believe in autonomy

I still fundamentally believe in that autonomous driving is an enormous social good.

I believe this is where the future of driving technology is headed, and it could be for good. This is not an indictment of the autonomous vehicle industry.

I think Tesla needs to do two things.

First, the company needs to be more conscious about its security culture and resolve bugs and issues much earlier.

The problem with an over-the-air software update is that it’s one thing if I haven’t updated my Spotify app. No one will lose his life, whether I am using the most up-to-date version of Spotify. But a person could lose their life if they don’t use the most up-to-date version of autonomous vehicle software.

Second, Tesla needs to change the narrative that this is a glorious, fully self-driving vehicle, when it isn’t.

There is only one company in the world that does that partially automate markets as ‘fully self-driving’. The words partially and completely do not mean the same thing in any reasonable interpretation of the English language.

I’m sorry, but calling it ‘Fully Supervised Self-Driving’ isn’t enough.

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