The question of what happened to the Tesla Autopilot crash data from a 2019 collision in Key Largo, Florida has now cost Tesla $243 million, a verdict that a federal judge refused to overturn on 20 February 2026, ruling that the evidence at trial ‘more than supported’ what the jury found, according to the California Accident Attorneys Blog reporting on the post-verdict ruling.
The crash itself was straightforward in its horror. On the night of 25 April 2019, George McGee was driving his Tesla Model S on Autopilot along Card Sound Road when he reached for his dropped phone, looked up too late, and ploughed into a stationary Chevy Tahoe. Dillon Angulo, 27, who had pulled off the unlit road to look at the stars with his girlfriend, Naibel Benavides, 22, was left with a shattered pelvis, broken jaw, and bleeding brain. Benavides died at the scene, her body found over 115 feet from the truck.
A Crash, a Cover-Up, and a $243 Million Verdict
Florida Highway Patrol investigator Cpl. David Riso immediately sought the car’s Autopilot computer, the device that would have captured five seconds of pre-crash video and a real-time reconstruction of what the system had perceived. Tesla’s own records confirmed that every vehicle with Autopilot automatically transmits crash data to the company’s servers after any collision. What Riso received instead was a thumb drive containing what a Tesla technician, Michael Calafell, described as corrupted, unreadable data.
Tesla later told the plaintiffs’ legal team in writing that it had never received the full crash dataset and could not produce an augmented visualisation of the Autopilot system’s activity. The plaintiffs did not accept that. Working with a Russian-born hacker known online as GreenTheOnly and a former Secret Service cybersecurity expert, Jason Lewis, they extracted the data directly from the Autopilot computer at a Florida Highway Patrol evidence facility in October 2024.
What they found contradicted Tesla’s account entirely. The data showed that the system had actively identified the stop sign, the stationary vehicle, and even a glimpse of the two pedestrians in its path. It issued no forward collision warning. Automatic emergency braking never fired. In the final seconds, Autopilot flashed a ‘take over immediately’ prompt and surrendered control to a driver who had no time to react. The system had seen everything and done nothing.
Tesla’s own Autopilot manager, David Shoemaker, later testified in a deposition that the company either received the complete crash dataset or nothing at all. His explanation for the missing data: ‘somebody at Tesla took an affirmative action to delete it,’ most likely during a bulk deletion of files. Calafell, the technician who had handled the computer in 2019, had signed a sworn declaration stating he never powered it up. In a subsequent deposition, he said he had not written the declaration, and that the order to prepare it had come from Tesla’s legal department.
What the Tesla Autopilot Crash Data Revealed in Court
The trial opened in Miami on 14 July 2025. Singleton Schreiber LLP, whose founding partner Brett Schreiber served as lead trial counsel for the plaintiffs, played the augmented video on multiple monitors for the jury. Frame by frame, at one-hundredth of a second intervals, the footage showed the Tesla’s projected-path line lurching wildly, with nowhere to go, before the car slammed into the Tahoe.
Safety expert Missy Cummings, a former Navy fighter pilot and MIT roboticist, testified that Tesla’s decision not to geofence its technology in 2019 (when other manufacturers already had) was ‘a way to sell more cars.’ On Musk’s repeated claim that a Tesla could drive more safely than a human: ‘It wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true now.’
The jury found Tesla 33% liable for the crash, with McGee bearing 67% of the fault. Because McGee was not a defendant, Tesla bore the full financial penalty. As NPR reported, the plaintiffs’ legal team argued their damages calculation was based on a multiple of all compensatory damages, meaning the full $243 million fell to Tesla: $19.5 million to the Benavides family, $23.1 million to Angulo, and $200 million in punitive damages. It was the largest verdict ever handed down against Tesla and the first time a jury found it liable in a wrongful death case tied directly to Autopilot’s operation. Tesla had rejected a $60 million settlement before the trial began.
Investigations Mount as Robotaxis Expand
The regulatory picture has continued to darken since the verdict. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened a preliminary investigation into Tesla covering nearly 2.9 million vehicles. By December 2025, documented violations had climbed from 58 incidents to 80. In March 2026, NHTSA upgraded a separate probe into Full Self-Driving’s handling of reduced-visibility conditions (sun glare, fog, camera-blinding hazards) to an engineering analysis covering more than 3.2 million vehicles, the step that typically precedes a recall.
In a separate development on 7 May 2026, NHTSA announced that the 2026 Tesla Model Y had become the first vehicle to pass the agency’s newly introduced Advanced Driver Assistance System benchmark tests, added to its New Car Assessment Programme. The result stands apart from the ongoing safety probes, which concern older system behaviour and data handling rather than the newer model’s hardware performance.
Meanwhile, a California administrative law judge ruled that the ‘Autopilot’ name followed ‘a long but unlawful tradition’ of misleading consumers and that ‘Full Self-Driving’ was ‘actually, unambiguously false and counterfactual.’ Tesla dropped the Autopilot name in January 2026 to avoid a dealer licence suspension, then filed suit against the California DMV in February to reverse the ruling.
All of this sits alongside Tesla’s expansion of its Robotaxi service across Austin, Dallas, and Houston, with rollouts in Phoenix and Las Vegas said to be coming. The Robotaxis run on a more advanced version of the same camera-only Full Self-Driving technology at the centre of the Benavides case.
The financial backdrop has also shifted. SpaceX completed the largest IPO in history this month, raising $75 billion at a fixed price of $135 per share ahead of its Nasdaq debut, according to CNBC. SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell has hinted publicly at a merger with Tesla. Fortune reported that SpaceX’s amended filing reserved 5% of the offering’s shares, approximately $3.75 billion at the $75 billion raise size, for certain employees, persons with business relationships with the company, and friends and family of executive officers, with those allocations carrying no lockup restriction.
Tesla’s appeal of the Miami verdict is moving through the 11th Circuit US Court of Appeals. In a parallel case involving a drunken driver on Autopilot who struck a police traffic stop near Houston in February 2021, injuring five officers, Tesla has again told the court it cannot find ‘the complete Autopilot crash dataset necessary to reconstruct Autopilot’s perception and decision-making.’ The plaintiffs’ attorneys allege someone at Tesla deleted it. That case is in discovery.