> A Tesla owner named George McGee was driving his Model S electric sedan while using the company’s Enhanced Autopilot, a partially automated driving system.
> 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.
On one hand I don't think you can apply a price to a human life, but on the other 329 million feels too high, especially since Tesla is only partially to blame, it wasn't FSD, and the driver wasn't using the system correctly. Had the system been being used correctly and Tesla was assigned more of the blame, would this be a 1 billion dollar case? 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
"[Plaintiffs] claimed Tesla’s Autopilot technology was flawed and deceptively marketed."
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 that one speaker, adhere to the ad hoc standard.
Autopilot quite literally means automatic pilot. Not “okay well maybe sometimes it’s automatic”.
This is why a jury is made up of the average person. The technical details of the language simply does not matter.
Sadly most people don't know that this case involved a comparatively ancient Tesla that did not have FSD. Seems like better attention to the "meaning of words" (like, the ones in the article you seem not to have read) might have helped things and not hurt them?
https://www.autopilotreview.com/tesla-now-offering-fsd-hardw...
In the context of a plane, autopilot always meant automatic piloting at altitude, and everyone knew it was the human pilots that were taking off and landing the plane.
I think you may be overestimating how much average people know about autopilot systems.
> 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/word/search.html?q=automatic
> Self-regulating: an automatic washing machine.
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...
https://www.tesla.com/support/autopilot - section “How long does Autopilot suspension last?”
It isn't ownership of the device disables things against you. That's licensing at best.
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.
And... no pilot is allowed to operate any automatic pilot system without supervision, I genuinely can't imagine that's what you're implying[1].
[1] Your "drop a pen" example seems deliberately constructed to invent a scenario where you think you're allowed to stop supervising the aircraft because it sounds harmless. It's not. You aren't. And if the FAA traces that post to your license I bet anything they'll suspend it.
If they are using any terms in their ads in ways other than the way the people the ads are aimed at (the general car buying public) can reasonably be expected to understand them, then I'd expect that could be considered to be negligent.
Much of the general public is going to get their entire idea of what an autopilot can do from what autopilots do in fiction.
The first modern cruise control (tied to speed) was released in 1948, and was called a "speedostat." The first commercial use of the speedostat was in 1958, where the speedostat was called "Auto Pilot" in select Chrylser luxury models. Chrysler almost immediately renamed "autopilot" to "cruise-control" the following year in 1959, because the use of the term "auto pilot" was deemed misleading (airplane autopilots in 1959 could maintain speed and heading).
Or in other words...the history of cruise control is that the name "auto pilot" was explicitly rejected because of the dangerous connotations the term implied about the vehicle's capabilities.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/sightless-visionar...
Tesla's self-driving advertising is all fucking garbage and then some George McGee browses Facebook while believing that his car is driving itself.
It's only fair. If the name was fine when it was attracting the buyers who were mislead about the real capabilities, it must be fine when it causing the same to jurors.
There's another similar argument to be made about the massive amount awarded as damages, which maybe will be lowered on appeal. If people (Tesla included) can make the argument that when a car learns something or gets an "IQ" improvement they all do, then it stands to reason that when one car is dangerous they all are (or were, even for a time). There are millions of Teslas on the road today so proportionally it's a low amount per unsafe car.
I know autopilot in airplanes is a set of assistive systems which don't remotely pretend to replace or obsolete humans. But that's not typically how it's used colloquially, and Tesla's marketing benefits heavily from the colloquial use of "autopilot" as something that can pilot a vehicle autonomously.
Yes, although courts do this all the time. Even if you believe this as solely manufacturer error, there are precedents. Consider General Motors ignition switch recalls. This affected 800k vehicles and resulted in 124 deaths.
> As part of the Deferred Prosecution Agreement, GM agreed to forfeit $900 million to the United States.[4][51] GM gave $600 million in compensation to surviving victims of accidents caused by faulty ignition switches
So about $5m per death, and 300m to the government. This seems excessive for one death, even if you believe Tesla was completely at fault. And the fact that this is the only such case (?) since 2019, seems like the fault isn't really on the manufacturer side.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch...
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.
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.
https://teslanorth.com/2025/03/28/teslas-full-self-driving-s...
Wait what? What activism is the judge doing here? The jury is the one that comes up with the verdict and damage award, no?
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.
On most other places you'd see it paying hundreds of millions in fines and a few millions in damages.
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.
> A navigation mechanism, as on an aircraft, that automatically maintains a preset course.
Applies here. As far as I can tell the system did do exactly that. But the details of the actual event are unclear (I've heard parked car but also just hitting the back of another car?)
automobile: self-propelled (self moving)
autopilot: self-piloting (self navigating)
So why are you ignoring the answer you got, instead waiting to hear if the person that answered is a pilot before you acknowledge it?
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.
...Um... You did get pilots hopping into a 737 MAX, getting training that barely mentioned an automated anti-stall and flight envelope management system called MCAS that eventually flew several planeloads of people into the ground. That was managements idea too, btw.
It's an entirely different domain.
And by the way what is true autopilot? Is the average joe a 787 pilot who's also autopilot master?
Funny that pretty much every car ships with autosteer now. Ones I've used didn't seem to have much warnings, explanations, disclaimers or agreements that pundits here assume it should.
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 behavior to change - and other automakers take notice and not repeat the behavior - then the fine must be meaningful to them.
That's another difference - fining an indivisible is not going to change risks much, the individual's behavior changing is not that meaningful compared to Tesla's behavior changing. And it's not like a huge fine is gonna make a difference in other drivers deciding to be better, whereas other automakers will notice a huge fine.
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.
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.
What if we garnished 100% of the future wages of all the employees in perpetuity as well as dissolving the corporate entity? You know, to to make sure the company stays all the way dead.
Fines. Massive fines.
"Corporate death penalty" is a genius invention of corporate lawyers to distract from the punitive effect of massive fines.
Fines and license revocable are precedented. They take real money from the corporation and its owners. Corporate death penalties are a legal morass that doesn’t actually punish shareholders, it just cancels a legal entity. If I own an LLC and have a choice between a fine and the LLC being dissolved, I’d almost always opt for the latter.
But fines are boring. Corporate death penalty sounds exciting. The anti-corporate folks tend to run with it like catnip, thus dissolving the coalition for holding large companies accountable. (Which, again, a corporate "execution" doesn't do. Nullifying my LLC doesn't actually hurt me, it just creates a little bit of work for my lawyer, and frankly, getting out of a fuckup by poofing the LLC without touching the udnerlying assets is sort of the selling point of incorporation.)
Ahistoric and orthogonal. Corporate fines and personal sanctions have coëxisted since corporations were a thing. Charter revocations, on the other hand, have almost always followed individual liability, because again, just poofing a corporation doesn't actually do anything to its assets, the part with actual value. (In the English world, corporations frequently came pinned with trade charters. The actual punishment was losing a trade monopoly. Not a legal fiction being dissolved.)
Nothing about corporate death penalties or corporate fines prevents personal liability. And neither particularly promotes it, either, particularly if guilt is never acknowledged as part of the proceedings.
This is just expropriation. Which is legally complicated. And raises questions around what the government should do with a bunch of seized assets and liabilities that may or may not be in a going condition, and whether some stakeholders should be reimbursed for their losses, for example employees owed pay, also do pensions count, and if so executive pensions as well, and look at that the discussion got technical and boring and nobody is listening anymore.
On the other hand, a massive fine punts that problem to the company. If it can pay it, great. It pays. If it can’t, we have bankruptcy processes already in place. And the government winds up with cash, not a Tesla plant in China.
Corporate death penalties are stupid. They’re good marketing. But they’re stupid. If you want to hold large companies unaccountable, bring it up any time someone serious threatens a fine.
Bullshit they aren't listening. Executives get no payout. Whatever happened happened on their watch. Summary dismissal. Keeps the incentives aligned. Otherwise you're just incentivizing unlawful behavior behind the corporate veil. Pensions do count. Since we've got such a fucked up social safety net in the U.S. that doubles as a mandatory investment slush fund for our corporate overlords, stewardship of said retirement funds should obviously be escrowed until such time as a new more compliant set of execs can either be installed, or the assets can be unwound.
There is no point in leaving something in the hands of the provably reckless/malicious. Which is exactly what these type of people are (executives making decisions that are traceable to reasonably foreseeable loss of life) are.
I'm done with victim blaming when we've made a habit of building orphan mulching machines that we just happen to call corporations.
"Corporations are people" means a corporation is people, not a corporation is a person.
People have rights, whether they are acting through a corporation or not. That's what Citizens United determined.
I hope you think about who misled you to thinking that "corporations are people" meant a corporation is a person and trust them a little less.
It's not in the state's interest to kill profitable things most of the time except occasionally as a deterrent example. It's the same reason richer people (who pay a lot of taxes, engage in activity spawning yet more taxes, etc) tend to get probation instead of jail. Likewise, the state is happy to kill small(er) businesses. It does this all the time and it doesn't make the news. Whereas with the big ones it just takes its pound of flesh and keeps things running.
As long as that incentive mostly remains, the outcomes will mostly remain.
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 in scores.
This is obviously targeted and the court system should not be playing favorites or going after political opponents
- There have been a lot more than one incident. This is one court case about one incident.
- There are an insane number of accidents reported; does it only matter to you if someone dies? A lot more than one person has died in an accident that involved a vehicle that was equipped with FSD.
- Your comment is obviously targeted and disingenuous.
There was even a recall over it: https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2023/02/16/tesla-full-self-driv...
So to answer your question of what one might want to come out of it, perhaps another recall where they fix the system or stop making false claims about what it can do.
This was a jury trial of a civil case - the family of the deceased took Tesla to court, not an anti-Tesla/Musk court system conspiracy.
And how many times did humans had to take over and save themselves and others from Tesla killing or injuring them? Tesla won't tell us this numbers, guess why ? The tech might be safe as a backup driver , but so far you need a human to pay attention to save himself from the car bugs/errors/glitches etc.
I really hate this bullshit safety claims pulled from someones ass, it is like me trying to convince you to get operated but an AI doctor by claiming "it is better then the a old and drunk doctor , he only killed a few people when the people supervising it did not payed attention but in the rest was very safe, we can't tell you how many times real doctors had to perform the hard work and our AI doctor only did stitching , those numbers need to be secret, but trust us the human doctors that had to intervene are just there because of the evil laws it could do the full job itself, we would not call it Full competent doctor if it can\t perform fully all expected tasks.
Don't advertise their driver assist system as "full self driving".
> Tesla cars come standard with advanced hardware capable of providing Autopilot features, and *full self-driving capabilities* — through software updates designed to improve functionality over time.
> Tesla's Autopilot AI team drives the future of autonomy of current and new generations of vehicles. Learn about the team and apply to help accelerate the world with *full self-driving*.
Now you can say that can be interpreted multiple ways - which means the copywriter is either incompetent, or intentionally misleading. Interestingly, the text from 2019 (https://web.archive.org/web/20191225054133/tesla.com/autopil...) is written a bit differently:
> ...full self-driving capabilities *in the future*...
> > > What behavior do you want them to change?
> > Don't advertise their driver assist system as "full self driving".
> The system involved in this crash was never advertised as "full self driving".
I assume "system involved in this crash" is referring to "Tesla Autopilot"; my reply was to contradict the statement '...*was never* advertised as "full self driving"'.
But you mentioning a date made me curious about when the advert text was changed:
- "...in the future" was added ~1.5 months before the accident: https://web.archive.org/web/20190306042234/https://www.tesla...
- "...in the future" was removed ~1.5 months after that lawsuit was filed: https://web.archive.org/web/20210603132215/https://www.tesla...
I knew that was complete nonsense, because I knew people who worked on Tesla's self-driving software, but that's how Tesla salespeople were selling the cars.
Could the dealer have been referring to the automatic parking or the summoning?
The pattern here is constantly hyping self-driving as something that is basically ready, and at the dealership I went to, they went a step further and claimed full self-driving was already a reality.
I'm not necessarily sure the victim(s) should get all of the punitive damages. $329 million is a gargantuan sum of money; it "feels" wrong to give a corporation-sized punishment to a small group of individuals. I could certainly see some proportion going toward funding regulatory agencies, but I fear the government getting the bulk of punitive damages would set up some perverse incentives.
I think in the absence of another alternative, giving it to the victim(s) is probably the best option. But is there an even better possible place to disburse the funds from these types of fines?
This feeling has a name; loss aversion.
It's a really interesting human traits. About 66% of people feel bad when someone else does well. The impact of this feeling on behavior (even behavior that is self-harming) is instructive.
The concept of "Fairness" comes into play as well. Many people have an expectation that the "world is fair" despite every evidence that it isn't. That results in "everything I don't get is unfair" whereas "everything I get I earned on my own." Someone rlse getting a windfall is thus "unfair".
I have some great news for you, then: the attorney probably took a third (more if they win an appeal).
> But is there an even better possible place to disburse the funds from these types of fines?
Oh, my mistake: I thought you meant way worse.
So the question then is - how much did Tesla benefit from claiming they could do this thing? That seems like a reasonable starting point for damages.
If you could only fine a person for committing murder, you wouldn't fine a billionaire $5m, and then hope he wouldn't go on killing everyone he thinks he'd rather have dead than $5m.
And if you want to draw parallels with individuals, an individual driver's license would be automatically suspended and revoked when found at fault for manslaughter. Would you propose a minimum 1~3 year ban on autopilot-by-Tesla within the US, instead?
I'm also a big proponent of exponential backoff for repeat offenders.
It’s not a class action lawsuit. If they want their cash they should sue too. That’s how our system works.
Using the tesla numbers you'd get somewhere between 43 and 129 million dollars personally, plus a share of the 200 million. And your share of the 200 million would probably be a lot higher than someone merely defrauded. And the 200 million would probably get a lot bigger in a proper class action.
If you want numbers for your theoretical you'll have to specify how much was compensatory and how much was punitive.
> The case also included startling charges by lawyers for the family of the deceased, 22-year-old, Naibel Benavides Leon, and for her injured boyfriend, Dillon Angulo. They claimed Tesla either hid or lost key evidence, including data and video recorded seconds before the accident.
> Tesla has previously faced criticism that it is slow to cough up crucial data by relatives of other victims in Tesla crashes, accusations that the car company has denied. In this case, the plaintiffs showed Tesla had the evidence all along, despite its repeated denials, by hiring a forensic data expert who dug it up. Tesla said it made a mistake after being shown the evidence and honestly hadn’t thought it was there.
-https://lasvegassun.com/news/2025/aug/01/jury-orders-tesla-t...
Nothing enrages a judge faster then an attempt to conceal evidence that a court has ordered be turned over during discovery. If this is then I suspect the punitive damages have to do as much about disregard to the legal process as it is the case itself.
Not only we can, but it also done routinely. For example, see this Practical Engineering video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQbaVdge7kU
Let me stop you right there. That's not how damages work.
Damages have two goals: compensate victims, and dissuade offenders from repeating the same mistakes. The latter involves punishments that discourage repeat offenses.
That's where these high values come from. They are intended to force the likes of Tesla to not ignore the lives they are ending due to their failures.
If damages were low, the likes of Tesla would do absolutely nothing and absorb them as operational expenses, and continue to cause deaths claiming they are unavoidable.
Once the likes of Tesla are forced to pay significant volumes of cash in damages, they suddenly find motives to take their design problems seriously.
There are ways to mitigate this, such as forcing the government to use these revenues in a way that is relevant to the issue at hand, i.e. creating safety jobs, strengthening control authorities, or something else.
You could also say that the amount is insignificant, but that could of course change with every lawsuit, and it of course accumulates. Or one could speculate that the interests are not really monetarily aligned at all (e.g. prisons), or that the judicial system is independent enough to stop propagation of these incentives. I think it is still needed to consider and try to controlledly align these motives between the relevant actors.
Let me stop you right there. Just the compensatory damages were 129 million. And most of that was charged to the driver, no corporate boost there.
But the punitive damages at $200 million are appropriate — it's what the jury thought would be appropriate to discourage Tesla's behaviors.
There was no "329 million fine"
There was a (a) 59 million compensatory damages award to the representative of the estate of the deceased and (b) 70 million compensatory damages award to her boyfriend who survived
The punitive damages were likley the result of Tesla's misconduct in deliberately concealing evidence, not its percentage of fault in causing the accident
HN front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44787780
Why would Tesla conceal evidence. That question is left as one for the reader
Indeed, the HN commenter missed several things
However, $329M sounds like an imaginary amount of money in a liability claim. If this guy crashed into a parked car without Tesla being involved, the family would be unfathomably lucky to even get 1% of that amount.
https://corporate.findlaw.com/litigation-disputes/punitive-d...
Hard for me to see this as anything but the driver’s fault. If you drop your phone, pull over and pick it up or just leave it on the floor. Everyone knows, and the car tells you, to pay attention and remain ready to take over.
I'm actually kind of serious about this - keeping people's stuff secure and organized is important in a moving car.
I'm surprised the touchscreen controls and retiring of stalks aren't coming under more safetly scrutiny.
With the new cars without a PRND stalk, how can you quickly reverse the car if you nose out too far and someone is coming from the side? will the car reverse or go forward into danger?
"a quick little swipe" seems like you're trying to minimize something that is actually dangerous. Controls like that should be in one location for muscle memory, stateless and able to be invoked without looking at them.
https://fortune.com/2025/03/07/steve-wozniak-says-tesla-is-w...
It passes a classic “but for…” test in causality.
Normally I turn the steering wheel when I want to turn my car. If you sold me a car and told me it had technology to make turns automatically without my input then I might let go of the wheel instead of turning it, something I would never have done otherwise. If I then don't turn and slam straight into a wall, am I at fault for trusting what I was sold to be true?
If the driver has heard that their Tesla is capable of autonomous driving, and therefore trusts it to drive itself, there may be a fair argument that Tesla shares in that blame. If it's a completely unreasonable belief (like me believing my 1998 Toyota is capable of self driving) then that argument falls apart. But if Tesla has promoted their self driving feature as being fully functional, used confusing descriptions like "Full Self-Driving", etc, it might become a pretty reasonable argument.
Also this doesn't stand water today as all new cars have some basic autosteer.
No other auto maker uses similar language. Ford and GM use BlueCruise and SuperCruise, clearly implying an improved kind of cruise control.
It doesn’t matter what it means. It matters what people think it means.
This is discussed tons of other places in these comments, and every previous story about Autopilot and FSD here on HN.
Anyone who drives on autopilot for few hours learns immediately of it’s limitations, it’s not an enigma like some try to purport.
Didn’t stop him.
For one thing, SuperCruise and BlueCruise are limited to mapped uninterrupted highways. He couldn’t activate it on that street.
Not only would that have physically prevented it. But if he had been using those systems he would have known they were limited. It makes it much more clear what their capabilities are.
We know how to fix the “bloodbath“. We don’t choose to. I question if level two driving systems help or make things worse despite having used them myself.
Slower speeds and better designed roads make a massive difference. We keep speeds high, make giant wide roads/stroads that psychologically encourage high speed even if the marked speed is lower. We don’t punish speeders anywhere near enough. and we don’t build with trees or other large things next to the road, we put the sidewalk there.
Because when a car that’s going too fast makes a mistake, it’s important that it can mow through a pedestrian and survive instead of hitting a big tree and hurt the driver.
those giant trees next to the road on old streets? They psychologically encouraged the driver not to go as fast. Because they don’t feel as safe at the higher speeds. we chose to stop doing that.
Lower death rates are 100% doable without modern assist systems of any kind.
So how does one conclude the that the car is capable of driving itself? Or is the version of Autopilot in the car in question different in this respect?
Autopilot is not autonomous driving and isn't marketed as such; Full Self Driving (FSD) is an extra cost option.
This accident occurred in 2019, several years before the recall.
One thing you notice when visiting Florida is that every other billboard says "In a wreck? Get a check! Call Lawyer Ambulance Chaser Jones!!"
Of course human life itself doesn't have a dollar value, but that also means that 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.
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.
That strikes me as an argument for a judgement of zero dollars, which is the exact opposite of the reality that life is worth infinitely more than money.
;-)
But my overarching point is that $329,000,000 is an absurd and arbitrary number, so for my purposes, either value NULL or 0 would make my case.
"The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons" - that was 2016... Funnily enough, in 2025 they are rolling exactly the same idea, as a Robotaxi, in California. Amazing.
This is really missing the point. Tesla could have called it “unicorn mode” and the result would still be the same.
The true issue at hand is that Elon Musk has been banding about telling people that their cars are going to drive themselves completely for over a decade now and overstating teslas capabilities in this area. Based on the sum totality of the messaging, many lay consumers believe teslas have been able to safely drive themselves unsupervised for a long time.
From a culpability standpoint, you can’t put all this hype out and then claim it doesn’t matter because technically the fine print says otherwise.
Every time you engage the system it tells you to pay attention. It also has sensors to detect when you don’t and forces you. If you have more than N violations in a trip, the system is unavailable for the remainder of your trip.
I don’t know how much clearer it could be.
I would argue that the system is actually so good (but imperfect) that people overestimate how good it is, and let their guard down.
If a system were more error prone, people would not trust it so much.
Tesla has always been blasé about safety.
Can you point to any other automaker that even come close to this level of false advertising ?
Maybe not give it a misleading name that implies full self-driving capabilities. Also not have the CEO publicly make grandiose claims of the performance over 8 years.
> If a system were more error prone, people would not trust it so much.
Unfortunately not. Youtube is full of videos of FSD trying to crash into oncoming traffic, parked cars etc, but then at the end of the video the driver goes “well that was pretty impressive” and just ignores all the suicide attempts.
https://www.kbb.com/car-advice/level-3-autonomy-what-car-buy...
https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/features/mercedes-level-...
> Mercedes Chief Technology Officer Markus Schäfer recently told Automotive News that Level 4 autonomy is "doable" by 2030.
That’s apples and oranges. And Mercedes saying something certainly doesn’t change the law.
Mercedes built a sophisticated system designed to be able to handle what it might run into within the very limited domain it was designed for. Then they got it certified and approved by the government. Among other things, it only works at low speed. Not 60 MPH. And I think only on highways, not where there are intersections.
Tesla‘s system is not child’s play, sure. But they unleashed it everywhere. Without any certification. And relatively few limits, which I think they later had to tighten.
Mercedes was minimizing risk. Tesla was not.
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2025/aug/01/jury-orders-tesla-t...
Things which simply help the driver, fine. Lane assist, adaptive cruise control and other such things that remove some of the workload but still leave the driver with the full responsibility of control. That's level 2.
Level 3 can generally run the car but is not capable of dealing with everything it might encounter. That's where you get danger--this guy thought he could pick up his dropped phone, his car didn't even manage to stay in it's lane. And the jury quite correctly said that's totally unacceptable.
The next step above level 2 should be skipping to level 4--a car that is capable of making a safe choice in all circumstances. That's Waymo, not Tesla. A Waymo will refuse to leave the area with the sufficiently detailed mapping it needs. A Waymo might encounter something on the road that it can't figure out--if that happens it will stop and wait for human help. Waymos can ask their control center for guidance (the remote operators do not actually drive, they tell the car what to do about what it doesn't understand) and can turn control over to a local first responder.
https://www.kbb.com/car-advice/level-3-autonomy-what-car-buy...
The only level 3 autonomous vehicles available for purchase in the U.S. are certain Mercedes-Benz models, and it only works on select roads in California and Nevada.
> Mercedes-Benz Drive Pilot: California and Nevada are currently the only states with roads approved for the Mercedes-Benz Drive Pilot. For 2025, only the EQS and S-Class offer Level 3 and then it’s by subscription.
Autopilot is/was fancy cruise-control. They don’t treat it like that or talk about it like that.
F** around and find out
> The case also included startling charges by lawyers for the family of the deceased, 22-year-old, Naibel Benavides Leon, and for her injured boyfriend, Dillon Angulo. They claimed Tesla either hid or lost key evidence, including data and video recorded seconds before the accident.
> Tesla has previously faced criticism that it is slow to cough up crucial data by relatives of other victims in Tesla crashes, accusations that the car company has denied. In this case, the plaintiffs showed Tesla had the evidence all along, despite its repeated denials, by hiring a forensic data expert who dug it up. Tesla said it made a mistake after being shown the evidence and honestly hadn’t thought it was there.
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2025/aug/01/jury-orders-tesla-t...
> CORRECTION: Tesla must pay portion of $329 million in damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says
This was added,
> The jury determined Tesla should be held 33% responsible for the fatal crash. That means the automaker would be responsible for about $42.5 million in compensatory damages.
33% liable
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/01/tesla-must-pay-329-million-i...
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.
I practice in that court regularly. Beth Bloom has a reputation as a good trial judge, so I'm somewhat skeptical of Tesla's claims that the trial was rife with errors. That said, both the Southern District and the Eleventh Circuit are known to frequently and readily lop off sizable chunks of punitive damages awards.
The real battle is just beginning: post-trial motions (including for remittitur) will be due in about a month. Then an appeal will likely follow.
Also, how the heck is Mr. McGee supposed to come up with the other 67% of this judgment?
He probably can't. Assuming the amount stands on appeal, and assuming that he doesn't have an insurance policy with policy limits high enough to cover it, he'll pay as much as he can out of personal assets and probably have his wages garnished.
He might also be able to declare bankruptcy to get out of some or all of it.
An interesting question is what the plaintiffs can do if they just cannot get anywhere near the amount owed from him.
A handful of states have "joint and several liability" for most torts. If this had been in one of those states the way damages work when there are multiple defendants is:
• Each defendant is fully responsible for all damages
• The plaintiff can not collect more than the total damage award
In such a state the plaintiffs could simply ask Tesla for the entire $329 million and Tesla would have to pay. Tesla would then have a claim for $220 million against McGee.
Of course McGee probably can't come up with that, so McGee still ends up in bankruptcy, but instead of plaintiffs being shortchanged by $220 million it would be Tesla getting shortchanged.
The idea behind joint and several liability is that in situations like there where someone has to be screwed it shouldn't be the innocent plaintiff.
Many other states have "modified joint and several liability". In those states rather than each defendant being fully responsible, only defendants whose share of the fault exceeds some threshold (often 50%) are fully responsible.
For example suppose there are three plaintiffs whose fault shares are 60%, 30%, and 10%. In a pure joint and several liability state plaintiff could collect from whichever are most able to come up with the money. If that's the 10% one they could demand 100% from them and leave it to that defendant to try to get reimbursed from the others.
In a modified joint and several liability state with a 50% threshold the most the plaintiff can ask from the 30% and 10% defendants is 30% and 10% respectively. They could ask the 60% defendant for 100% instead. If the 60% defendant is the deep pockets defendant that works out fine for the plaintiff, but if it is the 10% one and the other two are poor then the plaintiff is the one that gets screwed.
Finally there are some states that have gotten rid of joint and several liability, including Florida in 2006. In those states plaintiff can only collect from each defendant bases on their share of fault. Tesla pays their 33%, McGee pays whatever tiny amount he can, and the plaintiff is screwed.
What this sentence is describing are compensatory damages, e.g., compensation for loss of life
That number was 129 not 329, and Tesla was only found liable for 33% of it
CNBC: "Tesla's payout is based on $129 million in compensatory damages, and $200 million in punitive damages against the company."
CNBC: "The jury determined Tesla should be held 33% responsible for the fatal crash. That means the automaker would be responsible for about $42.5 million in compensatory damages."
42.5 is not even close to the 329 number that the HN commenter's claims "feels too high"
HN commenter: "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"
This sentence is describing something more akin to punitive damages, e.g., a fine
That number was 200 not 329
It seems the HN commenter makes no distinction between compensatory and punitive damages
2. The number that matters here is total compensatory damages, not Tesla's share.
There was only one fatality
The "price" was $59M not $329M
"433465224","533","2025-08-01","","","2025-08-01.001","PAPERLESS Minute Entry for proceedings held before Judge Beth Bloom: Jury Trial completed on 8/1/2025. Deliberations continue. Jury verdict reached. Jury verdict published and polled. Verdict in favor of Plaintiffs.Total in compensatory damages as to Neima Benavides a Personal Rep. of the Estate of Naibel Benavides Leon: $59,000,000.Total in compensatory damages as to Dillon Angulo: $70,000,000.Total in Punitive Damages as to Neima Benavides and Dillon Angulo: $200,000,000. Total time in court: 5 hour(s) : 30 minutes. Attorney Appearance(s): Adam T. Boumel, Douglas Fredric Eaton, Brett Schreiber, Todd Poses, Thomas P. Branigan, Joel H. Smith, Wendy Frank Lumish, Hilarie Bass, Court Reporter: Yvette Hernandez, 305-523-5698 / Yvette_Hernandez@flsd.uscourts.gov. (ego) (Entered: 08/01/2025)","447817730","PACER Document","","","","533","","","","","","","","","","",""
Autopilot requires you to have your foot on the accelerator? That seems weird to me.
A life built around car commutes is the outcome of a poorly thought out society. It had such stupid repercussions like racial segregation and the absurdity that everyone gets their own house along with the vertical airspace on top of it (exceedingly selfish). Along with that, it’s dangerous as fuck.
Someone needs to suggest dropping the speed limit across the board in America. Unfortunately the MAGA people will straight boycott roads if we do that (unfortunately?). Most people I talk to in Texas will concede the highways are full of maniacs.
When I lived in London, people waiting for the tube were leas than an arm’s length away when it rushed in. Blew my mind. Eventually I got used to it and did the same.
Sorry to cite German sources, but google translate should help you out
August 2024: 8 Year old “caught by a car on the pavement” https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/baden-wuerttemberg/ulm/kind-be... October 2024: A Mother and two children killed by an SUV that “veered off the road” https://www.merkur.de/deutschland/baden-wuerttemberg/erfasst... May 2025: 2 Children injured, on their way home from school https://www.focus.de/panorama/welt/20-meter-von-schule-entfe... July 2025: 2 pedestrians injured https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/starnberg/starnberg-aut...
At least that’s what is happening in my whereabouts. I remember when I was kid downtown was prime location for regular shopping and doing daily business. Now all of that moved to big box stores along major traffic arteries. Nowadays downtown is just a tourist trap with super expensive boutiques. I still go there to take a walk once a year or so, but besides that there’s no reason to there anymore for vast majority of people. But suburbs life is flourishing… With shops and services that are needed for every day life. Cheap and good eateries. Even casual entertainment is moving away from the city core.
All in all, not sure if it’s good or bad. I couldn’t afford living in downtown even in old era. And now I can live comfy life in suburbs. Not helping much to lower total amount of traffic though.
And many cities, especially here in Europe, are dense enough to need some mode of transit. Especially with workplaces concentrated either in office parks or industrial districts by the city. But not multi million megapolies that warrant a sweet metro system. And that’s where cars shine.
Although after living in one of the largest cities on earth with a very nice train system… there’s still plenty of traffic. And people still drive. Especially those who can’t afford living in city core and end up in cheaper more remote locations.
On top of that, that’d likely mean highways torn up and replaced by narrow streets. Which would mean more traffic closer to people on sidewalks.
The reverse of this happened here in backwaters of Eastern Europe. Before there was no city bypasses and in-city highways. Traffic was tenfold smaller because there were much much fewer private vehicles. But most of it was busses, lorries and so on. Long distance driving was done through downtowns. Nowadays there’s much more private traffic. But there’re bypasses routing away a lot of long distance traffic. A lot of city traffic is on isolated motor-only streets. Of course they waste space. But at the same time people don’t walk along those streets so big portion of traffic is not passing by anybody’s shoulder.
With more distance.
> On top of that, that’d likely mean highways torn up and replaced by narrow streets. Which would mean more traffic closer to people on sidewalks.
I'm not suggesting that. You can leave the limited access roads alone for now.
Besides complete hellholes like 80s US from the famous parking lot pictures, when trying to dense up the city, wide major streets would go first being built up. At least here there massive parking lots to just build on exist mostly on the outskirts. There’s no point in building on them. Going closer to downtown, lots of underground parking with private property on top. Some multi-floor private garages that cost a lot of money to build and unlikely to get torn down any time soon, especially if street parking was gone making it even bigger deficit. If you remove street parking, there won’t be space to fit in anything meaningful without rebuilding stuff around it. Which is not gonna happen in meaningful scale in sane timespan.
......yes?
You make the paved street narrower, allowing more distance between the lanes and the sidewalk.
And I didn't say anything about changing the density of the overall city. I'm talking about places where people are already walking but they're next to tons of cars.
> If you remove street parking, there won’t be space to fit in anything meaningful without rebuilding stuff around it.
The original complaint was people being within arms length of high speed cars. The meaningful thing you do is make that stop being the case.
Usually getting rid of traffic ideas involve densing up the cities by building more. The idea is that once you remove cars, people will want to live closer to PoIs. And more housing is needed. Hoping that people will just switch to public transit, from what I see, just doesn’t work - business and entertainment moves to car-OK parts of the city. There needs to be cheap housing and strict regulations preventing sprawl too.
And I’m saying that „just“ solving cars at high speed passing by is very complex.
When you remove physical divides between "road" and a "footpath" drivers become more aware that they are dangerous and slow down on their own. Making roads narrower has a similar effect, and removing car parking helps remove that divide and removes the blindspots they create.
There are many roads that should either stop pretending to be safe for pedestrians and turn into highways, or lower the speed limit and redesign the layout to suit the mixed traffic nature of the areas. Doesn't have to be extreme just be honest about the real use of the roads. If it's actually mostly pedestrians, suck it up, make it safe, go drive on the other faster roads.
It would go a long way if we could eliminate spaces where a driver can exceed 50 km/hr (31 MPH) while menacing unprotected users of the street.
Train travel is such a weird thing. The service, staff, stock, pricing, timetable etc is set by civil servants and politicians 250 miles away.
The ticketing system is Byzantine and if you make a mistake you get a fine or a criminal record, unless you look like a thug, in which case the staff rarely bother.
Tickets are miraculously priced similar to driving in many instances despite a train looking nothing like a car. In various cases, more expensive than driving
You can be late because a politician 200 miles away annoyed the staff so they decide not to turn up.
It also turns out services on Sunday ran on good will (overtime), so the annoyed staff who get ok pay rises now realised they don't want the overtime so good luck travelling on a Sunday in quite a few areas.
Because of low enforcement of infringements by thugs, they are drawn to the service. You'd think your very high ticket price would include some kind of security? No. Fuck you.
When the trains break down you are expected to be OK with being trapped on a train for hours with no open windows or working toilets because of some "greater good" and insufficient emergency response
I used to be extremely pro public transport
This is a clear case of misleading marketing. Spreading deceptive information and then hiding contradictory details in the fine print simply won't fly.
Intent is central to legal interpretation. There's been a clear intent to mislead about Tesla Autopilot's capabilities for years, and it's finally starting to backfire. It doesn't matter if Tesla is, on average, better if individual cases are lost due to constant misleading marketing.
Starting with FSD 13 on HW4, which came out last December, it's improved dramatically, and since then in my case it hasn't needed a single critical intervention. I think 12.6 on HW3 is also quite good.
The caveat is that we live in the Bay Area, which has an abundance of Tesla training data. Elsewhere I've heard the experience isn't as good. And of course, even in the Bay Area the reliability needs to get a few orders of magnitude higher to be suitable for fully unsupervised self-driving.
> this driver was solely at fault because he was speeding, with his foot on the accelerator—which overrode Autopilot—as he rummaged for his dropped phone without his eyes on the road
There’s lots to blame in auto makers « security marketing » and phone addiction but it seems obvious that driving a 1ton+ vehicle while not constantly looking at the road can lead to bad outcomes.
I’m all in for (mass surveillance) onboard eye tracking. Make it optional with 50% bonus on your car insurance and driving state tax. I see many, many drivers every day that are looking at their phone in very inappropriate moments like intersections and line changes.
… while McGee was two-thirds responsible for the crash, Tesla also bore a third of the responsibility for selling a vehicle "with a defect that was a legal cause of damage"
(Clarified my comment to "prevent" from "override" since overrides broadly exist - per jeroenhd's comment - but it seems in this case the argument was that the feature never engaged)
I was grateful for it, and at first glance, assuming Tesla’s argument is true, it’s hard to see how they are even partially responsible.
The driver took the fair share of the blame for actually making the decision, but the driver's defense that a feature called "autopilot" would supposedly intervene is exactly the kind of marketing gimmick that needs to be penalized.
It shouldn't have taken injury and death to get to this point.
They need to build a workable liability framework structure and mandate road construction to aid self driving vehicles.
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