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Tesla must pay portion of $329M damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

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Re: Tesla must pay portion of $329M damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

#91

Post by ra7 »

> “Tesla designed Autopilot only for controlled access highways yet deliberately chose not to restrict drivers from using it elsewhere, alongside Elon Musk telling the world Autopilot drove better than humans,” Brett Schreiber, counsel for the plaintiffs, said in an e-mailed statement on Friday.

Tesla had every opportunity to do the safe thing and limit Autopilot to only highways, but they want the hype of a product that "works anywhere" and don't want to be seen as offering a "limited" product like their competitors. Then they are surprised their users misuse it and blame it all on the driver. Tesla wants to have their cake and eat it too.

You know what else prevents misuse? Implementing safeguards for your safety critical product. It took multiple NHTSA probes for Tesla to implement obvious driver monitoring improvements to Autopilot/FSD. There's a reason Tesla is always in hot water: they simply lack the safety culture to do the right thing proactively.

Re: Tesla must pay portion of $329M damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

#92

Post by knodi123 »

metabagel wrote: post #43
jayess wrote: post #40

Good lord, $129 million in compensatory damages is absurd. One thing you notice when visiting Florida is that every other billboard says "In a wreck? Get a check! Call Lawyer Ambulance Chaser Jones!!"

How much is your life worth?

to me? an infinite amount! So trying to measure it in dollar terms is already a pointless exercise.

If you want to see the hole in this argument, try looking at it from the other side- How can you arrive at the conclusion that a life is worth only $329M? Why so low? Why not a billion, or a trillion?

If you have to come up with an objective and dispassionate standard, then I doubt you'd find one where the number it generates is $329 million.

Re: Tesla must pay portion of $329M damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

#93

Post by tantalor »

izacus wrote: post #17
SilverElfin wrote: post #6

> While driving, McGee dropped his mobile phone that he was using and scrambled to pick it up. He said during the trial that he believed Enhanced Autopilot would brake if an obstacle was in the way. His Model S accelerated through an intersection at just over 60 miles per hour, hitting a nearby empty parked car and its owners, who were standing on the other side of their vehicle. Hard for me to see this as anything b…

The driver at that time was Tesla Autopilot. So yeah, drivers fault as the jury said.

1/3 Tesla's fault, 2/3 the operator's

Re: Tesla must pay portion of $329M damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

#94

Post by tialaramex »

dontlaugh wrote: post #61
ratelimitsteve wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I hope we haven't internalized the idea that corporations should be treated the same as people. Only when it comes to rights. When it comes to responsibilities the corporations stop being people and go back to being amorphous, abstract things that are impossible to punish.

Would be nice to see executions of corporations as punishment.

Perhaps better to achieve symmetry by ceasing to execute humans.

You're never going to make executing the wrong corporation as thoroughly wicked as the numerous occasions on which we've executed the wrong human, so you can't make the scores even but you can stop putting more on the total for human misery.

Historically it was impractical to permanently warehouse large number of humans, death was more practical = but the US has been doing it for all sorts of crap for decades so that's not a problem here.

The US would still have much harsher punishments than Western Europe even without the death penalty, because it routinely uses life-means-life sentences where no matter what you're never seeing the outside again.

Re: Tesla must pay portion of $329M damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

#95

Post by xnx »

bko wrote: post #53
furyofantares wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This doesn't hold up logically unless I'm missing something, certainly the victim wouldn't be getting fined 329 million if it was decided to be his fault for not looking at the road I hope we haven't internalized the idea that corporations should be treated the same as people. There's essentially no difference $3M and $300M fine against most individuals, but $3M means very little to Tesla. If you want Tesla's behav…

> If you want Tesla's behavior to change - and other automakers take notice and not repeat the behavior - then the fine must be meaningful to them. What behavior do you want them to change? Remove FSD from their cars? It's been nearly 10 years since released and over 3bn miles driven. There's one case where someone died while fetching his cell phone. You would think if it was really dangerous, people would be dying i…

> What behavior do you want them to change?

Don't advertise their driver assist system as "full self driving".

Re: Tesla must pay portion of $329M damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

#96

Post by panarky »

bangaladore wrote: post #29
panarky wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you you make a manufacturing error without intentionally deceiving your customers through deceptive naming of features, you have to pay millions per death. If you intentionally give the feature a deceptive name like "autopilot", and then customers rely on that deceptive name to take their eyes off the road, then you have to pay hundreds of millions per death. Makes sense to me.

Wouldn't that logic mean any automaker advertising a "collision avoidance system" should be held liable whenever a car crashes into something? In practice, they are not, because the fine print always clarifies that the feature works only under specific conditions and that the driver remains responsible. Tesla's Autopilot and FSD come with the same kind of disclaimers. The underlying principle is the same.

There are plenty of accurate names Tesla could have selected.

They could have named it "adaptive cruise control with assisted lane-keeping".

Instead their customers are intentionally led to believe it's as safe and autonomous as an airliner's autopilot.

Disclaimers don't compensate for a deceptive name, endless false promises and nonstop marketing hype.

Re: Tesla must pay portion of $329M damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

#97

Post by lovehashbrowns »

bangaladore wrote: post #28
thorum wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The product simply should not be called Autopilot. Anyone with any common sense could predict that many people will (quite reasonably) assume that a feature called Autopilot functions as a true autopilot, and that misunderstanding will lead to fatalities.

> feature called Autopilot functions as a true autopilot What's a "true autopilot"? In airplanes, autopilot systems traditionally keep heading, altitude, and speed, but pilots are still required to monitor and take over when necessary. It's not hands-off or fully autonomous. I would argue you are creating a definition of "autopilot" that most people do not agree with.

It can be called anything in an airplane because there the pilot has some level of training with the system and understands its limits. You don't get a pilot hopping on a 767 and flying a bunch of people around solely because Boeing used autopilot in a deceptive marketing ad, then getting the surprise of a lifetime when the autopilot doesn't avoid flying into a mountain.

A car is another thing entirely because the general population's definition of "autopilot" does come into play and sometimes without proper training or education. I can just go rent a tesla right now.

Re: Tesla must pay portion of $329M damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

#98

Post by JumpCrisscross »

ajross wrote: post #21
IdSayThatllDoIt wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine the jury heard "autopilot" and then assigned blame to the company that called it that. "[Plaintiffs] claimed Tesla’s Autopilot technology was flawed and deceptively marketed."

As gets pointed out ad nauseum, the very first "cruise control" product in cars was in fact called "Auto-Pilot". Also real "autopilot" systems in aircraft (where the term of art comes from!) aren't remotely supervision-free. This is a fake argument (post hoc rationalization): It invents a meaning to a phrase that seems reasonable but that has never been rigorously applied ever, and demands that one speaker, and only…

> real "autopilot" systems in aircraft (where the term of art comes from!) aren't remotely supervision-free

Pilot here. If my G1000’s autopilot were flying and I dropped my phone, I’d pick it up. If my Subaru’s lane-keeping were engaged and I dropped me phone, I might try to feel around for it, but I would not go spelunking for several seconds.

Re: Tesla must pay portion of $329M damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

#99

Post by metabagel »

SoftTalker wrote: post #67
metabagel wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much is your life worth?

What is a reasonable forecast of your personal balance sheet at the time of your natural death? Of course human life itself doesn't have a dollar value, but that also means that money cannot replace a lost life.

> money cannot replace a lost life

So, money is basically worthless compared to life. That's why there are huge judgements when someone is found at fault for the death of another.

I think Tesla's apparent carelessness is a factor in this judgement as well.

Re: Tesla must pay portion of $329M damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

#100

Post by JumpCrisscross »

SoftTalker wrote: post #59
metabagel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dictionary definition for Americans is: > A navigation mechanism, as on an aircraft, that automatically maintains a preset course. https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=automatic+pilot Note that “autopilot” and “automatic pilot” are synonyms. https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=Autopilot An autopilot is supposed to be an automatic system, which doesn’t imply supervision. https://ahdictionary.com/wor…

Notably, an aircraft autopilot will NOT avoid hitting anything in its path, or slow down for it, or react to it in any way. It's just that the sky is very big and other aircraft are very small, so random collisions are extremely unlikely.

> an aircraft autopilot will NOT avoid hitting anything in its path, or slow down for it, or react to it in any way

TAWS (terrain) and ACAS (traffic) are built into modern autopilots.

And Tesla lied about its autopilot’s capabilities in proximity to this crash: “In 2016, the company posted a video of what appears to be a car equipped with Autopilot driving on its own. ‘The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons,’ reads a caption that flashes at the beginning of the video. ‘He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.’ (Six years later, a senior Tesla engineer conceded as part of a separate lawsuit that the video was staged and did not represent the true capabilities of the car.”

https://www.npr.org/2025/07/14/nx-s1-5462851/tesla-lawsuit-a...

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