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Tesla has to pay historic $243M judgement over Autopilot crash, judge says

electrek.co

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Re: Tesla has to pay historic $243M judgement over Autopilot crash, judge says

#121

Post by carefree-bob »

Starman_Jones wrote: post #119
tass wrote: post #40

I’m not usually an apologist, and I’d agree with this judgement if the car was left to its own devices, but the driver of the car held his foot on the accelerator which is why it blew through those stop signs and lights. In regards to the autopilot branding, would a reasonable person expect a plane on autopilot to fly safely if the pilot suddenly took over and pointed it at the ground?

The original judgement held that the driver was 2/3 responsible, Tesla 1/3 responsible, which seems reasonable. The $243 million wasn't for causing the accident, but was a punitive amount for doing things that looked an awful lot like lying to the court and withholding evidence.

This makes a lot of sense and makes the verdict seem reasonable, thanks for providing the context.

Re: Tesla has to pay historic $243M judgement over Autopilot crash, judge says

#122

Post by FireBeyond »

dekhn wrote: post #52
palmotea wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I read the article it says autopilot, not FSD. What's the difference? And does it matter? Both are misleadingly named, per the OP: > In December 2025, a California judge ruled that Tesla’s use of “Autopilot” in its marketing was misleading and violated state law, calling “Full Self-Driving” a name that is “actually, unambiguously false.” > Just this week, Tesla avoided a 30-day California sales suspension only b…

Autopilot is similar to cruise control that is aware of other cars, and lane keeping. I would fully expect the sort of accident that happened to happen (drop phone, stop controlling vehicle, it continues through an intersection). FSD has much more sophisticated features, explicitly handling traffic stops and lights. I would not expect the sort of accident to happen with FSD. The fact that Tesla misleads consumers is…

> FSD has much more sophisticated features, explicitly handling traffic stops and lights. I would not expect the sort of accident to happen with FSD.

FSD at one point had settings for whether it could roll through stop signs, or how much it could exceed the speed limit by. I've watched it interpret a railroad crossing as a weirdly malfunctioning red light with a convoy of intermittent trucks rolling by. It took the clearly delineated lanes of a roundabout as mere suggestions and has tried to barrel through them in a straight line.

I'd love to know where your confidence stems from.

Re: Tesla has to pay historic $243M judgement over Autopilot crash, judge says

#123

Post by alamortsubite »

hnburnsy wrote: post #90

We are all paying these large verdicts through higher product costs, lower salaries, lower stock market returns, and higher insurance rates.

100% correct. Also, with 40,000 deaths due to car crashes each year in the U.S. (and 2 million+ severe injuries not resulting in death), I'd consider it drop in the bucket.

Re: Tesla has to pay historic $243M judgement over Autopilot crash, judge says

#124

Post by dekhn »

FireBeyond wrote: post #122
dekhn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autopilot is similar to cruise control that is aware of other cars, and lane keeping. I would fully expect the sort of accident that happened to happen (drop phone, stop controlling vehicle, it continues through an intersection). FSD has much more sophisticated features, explicitly handling traffic stops and lights. I would not expect the sort of accident to happen with FSD. The fact that Tesla misleads consumers is…

> FSD has much more sophisticated features, explicitly handling traffic stops and lights. I would not expect the sort of accident to happen with FSD. FSD at one point had settings for whether it could roll through stop signs, or how much it could exceed the speed limit by. I've watched it interpret a railroad crossing as a weirdly malfunctioning red light with a convoy of intermittent trucks rolling by. It took the c…

My confidence comes only from what I hear people doing with the system. I have zero experience with it and consider most of the PR from Tesla to be junk.

"would not expect" is the way a cautious person demonstrates a lack of confidence.

Re: Tesla has to pay historic $243M judgement over Autopilot crash, judge says

#125

Post by zadikian »

breakyerself wrote: post #24
palmotea wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's an absurd judgement. > Consider also how many lives have been saved by the autopilot. > Be careful what you wish for. How many? Tell me.

It saved my life. I was standing on the Golden gate bridge looking over the edge. A Tesla model 3 pulled over and started playing baby I need your lovin at full volume. I cried and climbed into the car and it turned on the seat heater.

So the opposite of that Herbie scene https://youtu.be/QpgrKDBHlgo?si=hA8iDnIZSVvvs_d2&t=77

Re: Tesla has to pay historic $243M judgement over Autopilot crash, judge says

#126

Post by seanmcdirmid »

jrjeksjd8d wrote: post #47
tass wrote: post #40

I’m not usually an apologist, and I’d agree with this judgement if the car was left to its own devices, but the driver of the car held his foot on the accelerator which is why it blew through those stop signs and lights. In regards to the autopilot branding, would a reasonable person expect a plane on autopilot to fly safely if the pilot suddenly took over and pointed it at the ground?

The average person does not know how to fly a plane or what a plane autopilot does. It's a ridiculous superficial comparison. Planes have professional pilots who understand the capabilities and limits of aviation autopilot technology. Tesla has had it both ways for ages - their stock price was based on "self-driving cars" and their liability was based on "asterisk asterisk the car cannot drive itself".

Autopilots in airplanes are kind of dumb (keep heading, speed, and altitude, they won’t do much anything else), which is why Tesla doesn’t use the name as branding for its full self driving software. People at least know that much.

But then again even on HN people like parent think that autopilot is the same as full self driving, when it is and always has been just smarter cruise control. The payout was for autopilot (a feature that most new cars have these days under various names), not full self driving.

Re: Tesla has to pay historic $243M judgement over Autopilot crash, judge says

#127

Post by judahmeek »

nickff wrote: post #92
mmooss wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These product-liability lawsuits are out of control Businesses also claim that, all the time. We need some evidence. I remember doctors claiming that malpractice lawsuits were out of control; research I read said that it wasn't an economic issue for doctors and that malpractice was out of control.

I invite you to read both the claims and the judgements related to the Instant Pot lawsuits yourself; they're all quite clear, and you can come to your own decision about how reasonable they are. My read is that people overpowered the safety interlock, after which the lid (predictably) flew off, and they were injured (mostly by the hot steam and bits of food). I think it's ridiculous for people to expect safety mecha…

> My read is that people overpowered the safety interlock

And you obviously think doing so was next to impossible therefore Instant Pot shouldn't be liable.

But what evidence do you have of the difficulty of bypassing that specific safety mechanism?

Re: Tesla has to pay historic $243M judgement over Autopilot crash, judge says

#128

Post by FireBeyond »

palmotea wrote: post #23

> Tesla also claimed that references to CEO Elon Musk’s statements about Autopilot during the trial misled the jury.... > The company essentially argued that references to Elon Musk’s own public claims about Autopilot, claims that Tesla actively used to sell the feature for years, were somehow unfair to present to a jury. Judge Bloom was right to reject that argument. Of course, since Elon Musk has lied and over-prom…

Yeah, when the SEC pushed on the same issue, the company's response was to add fine print that Elon's statements "may be aspirational" and "may not reflect engineering realities".

Re: Tesla has to pay historic $243M judgement over Autopilot crash, judge says

#129

Post by nickff »

judahmeek wrote: post #127
nickff wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I invite you to read both the claims and the judgements related to the Instant Pot lawsuits yourself; they're all quite clear, and you can come to your own decision about how reasonable they are. My read is that people overpowered the safety interlock, after which the lid (predictably) flew off, and they were injured (mostly by the hot steam and bits of food). I think it's ridiculous for people to expect safety mecha…

> My read is that people overpowered the safety interlock And you obviously think doing so was next to impossible therefore Instant Pot shouldn't be liable. But what evidence do you have of the difficulty of bypassing that specific safety mechanism?

I've owned and used two of the affected models (for ~6 years in total), and also read the version of events presented by the plaintiffs (in their claims), as well as the judges' view of what happened.

I originally read the documents to understand whether the unit I own is safe, and believed in its safety strongly enough that I have continued to use it.

Re: Tesla has to pay historic $243M judgement over Autopilot crash, judge says

#130

Post by diasf »

The comments on this post are very misinformed. The car did not issue a "Take over immediately" alert despite having the capability or claiming to do so[1]. Hence the partial blame. The punitive damages are justified since, Tesla during the whole process has been found to repeatedly lie about the existence of the server logs. @greentheonly on X, found that the server logs was indeed uploaded to their servers[2] and after this they had to hand over the logs. The logs were crucial in determining that Autopilot/Autosteer was on and that no warnings were issued. Tesla knew that they had the server logs all along. For a corporation to engage in this behavior is almost criminal.

[1] https://electrek.co/2025/08/04/tesla-withheld-data-lied-misd... [2] https://www.pcmag.com/articles/hacker-who-helped-score-243-m...

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