Self-Driving in California

On August 1st, 2025, a federal Jury in Florida held that Tesla was partly responsible for a deadly crash involving one of its “Autopilot” driver assist technology with victims being awarded more than $243 million in damages. This case marks pivotal moment in autonomous vehicle liability and will be a case that many Plaintiffs and courts will look to when approaching their own cases including in California.

There is plenty of uncertainty around autonomous driving vehicles especially as the technology becomes more and more utilized. This becomes a challenge for dealing with determining liability for auto-accidents. One of, if not the biggest, is the level at which the driver or the company is liable for an accident. This was a key issue for the Florida case.

In this case, George McGee was driving his Tesla Model S with “Autopilot” enabled down a dark, rural, two-lane road towards a T-intersection. McGee testified that while accelerating, he dropped his phone and took his eyes off the road to pick it up. It is then that McGee drove through a stop sign at 62 miles per hour, through signs warning that the lane had ended, and into a parked truck with two passengers idling in the truck bed. The incident led to one of the passengers deceased and another seriously injured.

McGee admitted to his own liability, but stated that he trusted the technology too much, believing that “if the car saw something in front of it, it would provide a warning and apply the brakes”. Plaintiff’s counsel used this reliance, data from the car, and dashcam footage in their argument that Tesla’s “Autopilot” technology allowed drivers to act recklessly. By not self-disengaging when the driver is distracted or driving roads difficult for autonomous technology, the technology overpromised its self-driving capabilities.

Lawyers for Tesla countered claims of liability by stating the technology still requires human involvement. The Society of Automotive Engineer’s classification system of level of autonomy has determined classification of autonomous driving, where level 0 is no automation and level 5 is full automation where a human driver is not required at any time. Level 2, such as Tesla’s “Autopilot”, allows the car to self-steer and accelerate/ decelerate while the driver is always engaged. Tesla’s argument was that this technology requires human attention, and the incident was caused by McGee’s distracted state.

This case forms another avenue for which liability can be found in self-driving car claims. Plaintiffs will argue that technological terms such as Tesla’s “Autopilot” misleads consumers into believing that the car is more autonomous than it actually is, leading to overreliance on the feature and less human involvement on the road. This argument of product liability will create more significant risks to car manufacturers as they develop more autonomous technology in the future.