Brett Schreiber, Founding Partner at Singleton Schreiber, was recently featured by The Verge in their article, "The lawyer who beat Tesla is ready for ‘round two’," published on August 7th.
The article covers the unprecedented $243 million wrongful death lawsuit verdict against Tesla, where a Florida jury found the company 33% responsible for a 2019 automobile crash that killed Naibel Benavides and seriously injured her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo. The driver, Mr. George McGee, had engaged with the Autopilot system.
Mr. Schreiber told The Verge that his clients rejected a substantial, secret settlement offer because they believed the case was "bigger than themselves:
"Well, I mean, they did make an overture to settle the case, and for a very large sum of money. Now, it was a fraction of the verdict, but the condition of the settlement was that it would be secret. And my clients were not interested in a secret settlement. They knew that this was a case and a cause that was bigger than themselves. And it was important to them that we shine a light on what Tesla has done."
Mr. Schreiber explained that his theme in closing argument was about "Tesla’s choices and Tesla’s words," contrasting the company's public image with its courtroom defense, noting how CEO Elon Musk's public statements promoting "full self-driving" capabilities were contradicted by the company's courtroom claim:
"My theme in my closing argument was about Tesla’s choices and Tesla’s words. And to your point as to why they’ve been successful, I think it’s in part because there are two Teslas. There’s Tesla in the showroom and then there’s Tesla in the courtroom. And Tesla in the showroom tells you that they’ve invented the greatest full self-driving car the world has ever seen. Mr. Musk has been peddling to consumers and investors for more than a decade that the cars are fully self-driving, that the hardware is capable of full autonomy. And those statements were as untrue the day he said them as they remain untrue today. But then they showed up in a courtroom and they say, No, no, no, this is nothing but a driver assistance feature."
Mr. Schreiber highlighted the jury's unanimous verdict and the message it sent:
"Your choices and your words matter. Do better."
He added a powerful conclusion from the jury's decision:
"This unanimous jury saw through Tesla’s attempt to make words meaningless and sent a very strong message: when you elevate profits and greed over life and safety, you will be held accountable. Choices and words matter."
Critiquing Tesla's unique approach to technology, Mr. Schreiber called the company an "outlier," stating:
"This was not a car company that got into tech. This was a tech company that got into cars."
Mr. Schreiber also addressed concerns about Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) system, dismissing claims of its superiority compared to the older Autopilot system. He argued that despite claims of improvement, the system lacks essential components for safety:
"For the outcome of this jury, it is beside the point. We could not introduce evidence about 2023 and 2024 and later developments. But I got news for the fan base. It’s not better. They’ve actually eliminated radar. They’ve got cameras only. It doesn’t work. Everyone who knows anything and who’s been following and paying attention in autonomous vehicle development for the last decade knows that the holy trinity of safety is lidar, radar, and cameras. You cannot create a camera-based-only system that is going to be better than a human driver. It’s not possible. It’s not done. They sure as heck haven’t done it. And their fusion system … continues to fail.
You will see internal documents produced by Tesla where they determine that in 6 percent of the crashes that they received information on in 2019, they themselves determined that Autopilot was at fault. It’s so stupid, but my point is, it’s not better. It’s a three-legged stool. If you take one of the legs out, the other two fall down. Like I said, I’ll tip my hat to Waymo. I’ll tip my hat to those guys. They geofence. They three-dimensionally map, they tie in infrastructure, they use lidar, they use radar, they use cameras. Are they perfect? No. And that’s the other thing I want to be really clear about. We are not anti-autonomous vehicle technology. We are not anti-progress. To the contrary, we think this stuff can and will save lives. It just has to be done the right way. And Tesla’s done it the wrong way. And this unanimous jury who sat for three weeks listening to 40-plus hours a week of testimony and evidence felt the same way."
Regarding what the trial revealed about how Tesla handles its Autopilot data and interacts with law enforcement, Mr. Schreiber stated that he is confident a motion for sanctions against Tesla for withholding evidence will be unsealed, and that Tesla is not always forthright with data:
"The docket should be fully unsealed in about three weeks. The court has ordered that and has given Tesla an opportunity to file a brief about anything specifically they want to keep under wraps. I am confident that the motion that we brought for sanctions against them for withholding evidence for four years will become fully unsealed. It would be irresponsible for me to say more than what they’ve said, but suffice it to say, there is more to that story, and it will be set out.
But to that end, I can say that Tesla has a system of gathering data. They receive it immediately after crashes. And it is a very fair, I would say almost generous, statement to say that they’re not always forthright with that information. And it’s in part because people just don’t understand it. Law enforcement doesn’t understand it. Government investigators don’t understand it. Through this case, we actually understood it better than even Tesla’s lawyers did. Now, the in-house people knew. And again, I can’t say whose decision it was to delete the data.
But somebody at Tesla knew that if this information on the heels, six weeks later after the Jeremy Banner crash occurred in Deerfield Beach, Florida, that having another Autopilot fatality, that they knew that law enforcement wanted to share with federal investigators, they knew that would be bad for business. Why they did it? Only they can answer that question."
Addressing Tesla's efforts to roll out a robotaxi service, Mr. Schreiber offered a clear message to interested individuals and regulators:
"I would say that this verdict hopefully sends a very clear message to Tesla. That they need to do better. They need to elevate people’s lives and people’s safety over greed and profits. That’s what I told the jury in closing argument, that this was not only just an opportunity. I know that jury instruction talks about punishing Tesla and deterring bad conduct. But I told them really this was an opportunity for them to help Tesla, because when a company gets to a point where they’re elevating profits and greed over people’s lives and safety, then that is a company that has lost its way. That is a company that needs to have its course corrected. What I hope, through their efforts at developing a Level 4 system, is that Tesla will receive this message for what it was. It’s an opportunity and a teachable moment to be better."
He further cautioned against Tesla's current approach to robotaxis, noting the system's limitations:
"The problem is … it’s my understanding that it is a camera-only-based system. That’s a problem. Right, the megapixels on the cameras, on a 2025 Tesla, if they’re anything like what they’re putting on the robotaxi, have a lower megapixel resolution than my iPhone. The human eye is 250 megapixels. Be better. There’s a reason why responsible manufacturers are doing this differently. And again, is it hubris? Is it greed? I don’t know. I don’t know what this motivation is to double down and just try to do it the way that, Oh, we can do it this way and no one else can. I struggle with that. I’m just a lawyer. What do I know? But engineers, people who have spent decades, careers, lifetimes studying this stuff, have reached the same conclusions. So my hope is that they pause. They look at what they’re doing and they find ways to do it better. To do it safer."
Mr. Schreiber concluded his thoughts on the verdict's broader impact:
"That’s what this verdict was about: sending a message that you cannot use our public roadways as your personal laboratory to test production vehicles. And then when you discover that an incident occurs, that you make an incremental change. That’s what their corporate representative said. And as I said a couple of times publicly and told the jury, an incident to the families impacted is known as a funeral. These are people’s lives that you’re playing with. So my hope is that they really think about their approach. I hope that consumers demand that they rethink their approach. I hope that analysts looking at the impact of this verdict and potential verdicts in the future tell them that they need to do better. Because I think that’s the only way that we’re going to ever see it really change. It seems likely that there will need to be more of these types of verdicts before we do see some change, either from the company or from the way that the market views the company."
Looking ahead, Mr. Schreiber is preparing for "round two" with the Maldonado v. Tesla trial in California in 75 days. He highlighted the significant implications of this upcoming case, particularly the potential for much higher punitive damages, as California law does not have the same caps as Florida. Mr. Schreiber emphasized the power of the facts in such cases:
"If I had asked that jury in Florida for a billion dollars, they would have given it to me. But I couldn’t ask them for that. Florida law says punitives can only be three times compensatories. I asked for $104 million in compensatories. They gave me $129 million."
He believes the Maldonado case will reveal how Tesla "betrayed the public, he betrayed his own engineers."
The Benavides v. Tesla Inc. case number is 1:21-cv-21940, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
