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.<p>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?
A “reasonable person” in a cockpit is not the same as a “reasonable person” behind the steering wheel.<p>Pilots undergo rigorous training with exam after exam they must pass.<p>No one is handed the keys to a Boeing 747 after some weekly evening course and an hours driving test.
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.<p>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".
According to your analogy. Certified pilot = Certified driving license holder. Its not like Tesla is advertising non driving license or in eligible person can drive using Autopilot. I wonder how can you even justify your statement
If the average person does not know what an autopilot does, why would they expect Tesla's 'autopilot' to take such good care of them? I am reminded of a case many years ago when a man turned on the cruise control in his RV and went to the back to make himself lunch, after which the RV went off some sort of hill or cliff.<p>Rudimentary 'autopilots' on aircraft have existed for about a century now, and the earlier versions (before transistorization) only controlled heading and attitude (if conditions and other settings allowed it), with little indication of failure.
This case will make settlement amounts higher, which is the main thing car companies care about when making decisions about driving features/marketing.<p>With Robotaxi it will get even higher as it will be clear 100% the company's fault.
Tesla Apologists: The judge/jury agreed that Tesla was "Full Self Driving" all the way to the scene of the crash.
If I read the article it says autopilot, not FSD.
> If I read the article it says autopilot, not FSD.<p>What's the difference? And does it matter?<p>Both are misleadingly named, per the OP:<p>> 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.”<p>> Just this week, Tesla avoided a 30-day California sales suspension only by agreeing to drop the “Autopilot” branding entirely. Tesla has since discontinued Autopilot as a standalone product in the U.S. and Canada.<p>> This lands weight to one of the main arguments used in lawsuits since the landmark case: Tesla has been misleading customers into thinking that its driver assist features (Autopilot and FSD) are more capable than they are – leading drivers to pay less attention.
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).<p>FSD has much more sophisticated features, explicitly handling traffic stops and lights. I would not expect the sort of accident to happen with FSD.<p>The fact that Tesla misleads consumers is a different issue from Autopilot and FSD being different.
I remember having this argument with a friend.<p>My argument was that the idea that the name Autopilot is misleading comes not from Tesla naming it wrong, it comes from what most people think "Autopilots" on an aircraft do. (And that is probably good enough to argue in court, that it doesn't matter what's factually correct, it matters what people understand based on their knowledge)<p>Autopilot on a Tesla historically did two things - traffic aware cruise control (keeps a gap from the car in front of you) and stays in its lane. If you tell it to, it can suggest and change lanes. In some cases, it'll also take an exit ramp. (which was called Navigate on Autopilot)<p>Autopilots on planes roughly also do the same. They keep speed and heading, and will also change heading to follow a GPS flight plan. Pilots still take off and land the plane. (Like Tesla drivers still get you on the highway and off).<p>Full Self Driving (to which they've now added the word "Supervised" probably from court cases but it always was quite obvious that it was supervised, you had to keep shaking the steering wheel to prove you were alert, same as with Autopilot btw), is a different AI model that even stops at traffic lights, navigates parking lots, everything. That's the true "summon my car from LA to NY" dream at least.<p>So to answer your question, "What's the difference" – it's huge. And I think they've covered that in earlier court cases.<p>But one could argue that maybe they should've restricted it to only highways maybe? (fewer traffic lights, no intersections), but I don't know the details of each recent crash.
Autopilots do a lot more than that because flying an aircraft safely is a lot more complicated than turning a steering wheel left and right and accelerating or breaking.<p>Tesla’s Autopilot being unable to swap from one road to another makes is way less capable than a decades old civilian autopilots which will get you to any arbitrary location as long as you have fuel. Calling the current FSD Autopilot would be overstating its capabilities, but reasonably fitting.
Airplane "autoland" goes back a ways:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland</a>
well the other person in the comments said the guy literally held his accelerator to the floor the entire time. is that actually a reasonable standard, or are you preemptively out for blood because you would never let reality get in the way of a good agenda? ironic, given that you go out of your way to accuse others of this. methinks you doth protest too much?
I'm so lost. The guy decided to pick up the phone from the floor while driving the car at high speed.<p>1. It could be ANY car with similar at that time auto steer capabilities.
2. Why the hate , because of some false promise ? Because as of today same car would save the guy in exact same situation, because FSD now handles red lights perfectly. Far better and safer vs ANY other tech included in the avg car price of same segment ( $40-50k).
Not sure if it’s using the same FSD decision matrix but my model S chimed at me to drive into the intersection while sitting at a red light Last night with absolutely zero possibility it saw a green light anywhere in the intersection.<p>Perfectly isn’t a descriptor I would use. But this is just anecdotal.
As the source article says, the jury did agree that the driver was mostly liable. They found Tesla partially liable because they felt that Tesla's false promise led to the driver picking up his phone. If they'd been more honest about the limitations of their Autopilot system, as other companies are about their assisted driving functionalities, the driver might have realized that he needed to stop the car before picking up his phone.
> <i>Why the hate , because of some false promise ?</i><p>Another name for "false promise" when made for capital gain is "fraud". And when the fraud is in the context of vehicular autonomy, it becomes "fraud with reckless endangerment". And when it leads to someone's death, that makes it "proximate cause to manslaughter".
Will this have any effect on other companies developing self driving tech? It sets a very high precedent for fines, and may discourage companies from further working on such tech.
Developing, no, but once companies start releasing vehicles onto our shared public streets I have a lot less tolerance for launching science experiments that end up killing bystanders.<p>I can understand the argument that in the abstract over-regulation kills innovation but at the same time in the US the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that it’s time for a correction.
That's an old argument by corporations against liability. Should they not be fully liable?<p>It should discourage them from making unsafe products. If it's not economical for them to make safe products, it's good that they go bankrupt and the economic resources - talent, money - go to someone else. Bankruptcy and business failure are just as fundamental to capitalism as profit.
These product-liability lawsuits are out of control; perhaps this judgement is directionally correct, but the punitive damages seem insane. This reminds me of the lawsuits which drove Instant Pot bankrupt, where the users were clearly doing very stupid things, and suffered injuries because they were able to physically overpower the safety mechanisms on their pressure-cookers.
> These product-liability lawsuits are out of control<p>Businesses also claim that, all the time. We need some evidence.<p>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.
Good<p>It seems clear that "autopilot" was a boisterous overclaim of its capabilities that led to people dying.<p>It may be minorly absurd to win founder-IPO-level wealth in a lawsuit, but it's also clear that smaller numbers don't act as an effective deterrent to people like Elon Musk.
Tesla would benefit from the board replacing the CEO. It's increasingly clear that there is a problem and it's not talent, it's decision-making.
I'm not clear on what Tesla is doing these days. They've been left in the dust on autonomous driving, they've failed to update their successful car models, and their only new model was a spectacular failure.
Ask the CEO? Based on recent incentives and acquisitions, are they planning to remain a car company?
>> I'm not clear on what Tesla is doing these days.<p>> Ask the CEO? Based on recent incentives and acquisitions, are they planning to remain a car company?<p>I believe Musk wants to hype humanoid robots, because he can't get away with irrationally hyping electric cars or self-driving technology like you used to.<p>Tesla was never a car company, their real product is sci-fi dreams.
Agreed, and he’s already behind in humanoid robots, so the hype there won’t last long. The problem is that China is obliterating him at every turn because they actually build things that work instead of just hyping things and saying fake numbers of how much money it could be if every human on the planet bought 20.
By which metrics has Tesla been left in the dust wrt autonomous driving? Right now they are the only brand where you can buy a car and have it do basically 90% (or sometimes 100%) of your daily driving. Sure, it's supervised, but the alternatives are literally extremely geogated taxis
Tesla has a level 3 system that it's willing to gamble on not needing intervention for a handful of miles for a handful of Tesla fanboys. It's very telling that their "level 4" robotaxis are basically unicorns and only exist (existed? it's not clear they are even available anymore) in a single neighborhood subsection of the level 3 robotaxis full area in Austin.<p>Waymo on the other hand has a level 4 system, and has for many years, in many cities, with large service areas.<p>Tesla is unquestionably in the dust here, and the delusional, er, faithful are holding out for this mythical switch flip where Elon snaps his fingers and every Tesla turns into a level 4 robotaxi (despite the compute power in these cars being on the level of a GTX 5090, and the robotaxis having custom hardware loadouts)
I don't understand the point of your reply. Waymo is geofenced taxis. You cannot buy a Waymo. It cannot drive basically wherever you want. Teslas mostly can. So, again, how is Tesla the one left in the dust?
It's not free, is it? You buy the car, subscribe to their arbitrarily-priced subscription service, and <i>then</i> it does 90% of your driving.<p>That's like paying for a "self-juicing juicer" that only works with proprietary juice packages sold through an overpriced subscription.<p>Edit: Mostly a criticism. I have no bone to pick with Elon, but subscription slopware is the reason why Chinese EVs are more desirable to average Joes like me.
And as the lunar new year demo dance shows, China is leaving them in the dust building humanoid robots.
My question too.<p>though they did update the model y (looks like a duck), they just cancelled the model S and X
Optimus robots!<p>In 2 years Tesla will be replacing most factory workers with fully autonomous robots that will do most of the work. This will generate trillions in revenue and is totally definitely trust me bro possible.<p>Expect huge updates on this coming in the near future, soon. Tesla will be the most valuable company on Earth. Get in the stock now.<p>(cars, solar panels, energy storage, and robotaxis are no longer part of the roadmap because optimus bots will bring in so much money in 2 years definitiely that these things won't matter so don't ask about them or think about them thanks.)
Yet Tesla is trading near its all time high.
Unsafe at any speed.
Too true. Just a few days ago it was determined it was unsafe at 0 speed. I'm not joking: <a href="https://electrek.co/2026/02/17/tesla-robotaxi-adds-5-more-crashes-austin-month-4x-worse-than-humans/#:~:text=Jul%202025-,0%20mph,-SUV" rel="nofollow">https://electrek.co/2026/02/17/tesla-robotaxi-adds-5-more-cr...</a>
It's crazy that they weren't reeled in by a regulator and it had to make it all the way through the court system. People are dead. A court judgement can't change that. Preemptive action would have.
> Tesla also claimed that references to CEO Elon Musk’s statements about Autopilot during the trial misled the jury....<p>> 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.<p>Of course, since Elon Musk has lied and over-promised a lot about Tesla's self-driving technology. It's an interesting defense to admit your CEO is a lair and can't be trusted.
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This will continually be appealed until it’s reduced.
They claim have a pretrial agreement to reduce it to 3x compensatory damages (which would make the total judgemnet 160 million instead of 243 million).<p>Appealing is expensive because they have to post a bond with 100% collateral, and you pay for it yearly.
In this case, probably around 8 million a year.<p>So in <i>general</i> its not worth appealing for 5 years unless they think they will knock off 25-30% of the judgement.<p>Here it's the first case of it's kind so i'm sure they will appeal, but if they lose those appeals, most companies that aren't insane would cut their losses instead of trying to fight everything.
This was the appeal.
No it wasn't, it was a motion to set aside the verdict, made before the trial judge.<p>The appeal will go to the 11th circuit.
No it wasn't. This was the trial judge deciding to not reduce it. $43 million in compensatory damages is unusually high for a wrongful death.
Does the American legal system have infinite appeals?