Two experts on autonomous vehicle safety recently dove into legal arguments and engineering factors that shaped last week’s landmark jury decision against Tesla, at one point surfacing an important takeaway about insurance for Tesla drivers.
“Your insurance company most likely is going to ‘total loss’ this car. You want to say to your insurance company, ‘I want this car put on hold until we’ve figured out what happened,’” said Mike Nelson, a partner in the law firm Nelson Law, LLC, during a webinar Monday, advising Tesla owners who might at some point be involved in serious accident situations like George McGee, the Tesla driver in the Benavides v. Tesla case.
A Florida jury last week found that Tesla was 33% liable for an accident that killed a woman and injured her boyfriend in 2019. The two were standing next to their Chevy Tahoe when McGee’s Tesla Model S, operating in Autopi…