Jury trials can expose companies to substantial costs, and Tesla appears to have avoided a potentially enormous award by settling a lawsuit involving the death of a 31-year-old Model S driver who had Autopilot enabled. The terms of the agreement have not been disclosed.
On February 18, 2023, Genesis Giovanni Mendoza Martinez was traveling in his 2014 Tesla Model S on Interstate 680 in Contra Costa County, California, when the EV crashed into a fire truck attending an earlier collision. Martinez died in the 70-mph impact, and his brother, who was riding in the passenger seat, sustained serious injuries.
The lawsuit challenged Tesla’s advertising of Autopilot, arguing that Martinez might have survived if the system had operated as represented. It alleged that Tesla and company chief Elon Musk misrepresented the capabilities of the Level 2 driver-assistance system, leading Martinez to rely on it too heavily.
Judge Vince Chhabria was overseeing the case and ruled last year that the name “Autopilot” was “plausibly misleading.” He also found that Musk’s comments about the system, including his claim that it was “probably better” than a human driver, could support legal action.
Did Tesla Make False Promises?
Information recovered from the wrecked Model S showed that Autopilot had been active for approximately 12 minutes before the crash. The lawsuit argued that Tesla’s marketing led the driver to believe the EV “would drive itself and he no longer needed to drive it.”
Tesla strongly denied the allegations, arguing that it was not responsible because Martinez had disregarded warnings in the owner’s manual as well as alerts issued inside the vehicle. Even so, the judge allowed the case to proceed toward a jury trial, where Musk’s Autopilot statements would have faced close scrutiny. Tesla agreed to settle before that happened.
Tesla has reached settlements in several comparable lawsuits. In 2025, however, the automaker chose to take one case in Florida to trial, and a jury ordered it to pay $243 million in damages over the 2019 death of a man inside a Model S with Autopilot engaged when it struck a parked Chevrolet Tahoe.
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