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Tesla loses Autopilot wrongful death case in $329 million verdict
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
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That's a tough one. Yeah they sell it as autopilot. But anyone seeing a steering wheel and pedals should reasonably assume that they are there to override the autopilot. Saying he thought the car would protect him from his mistake doesn't sound like something an autopilot would do. Tesla has done plenty wrong, but this case isn't much of an example of that.
More than one person can be at fault, my friend. Don't lie about your product and expect no consequences.
I don't know. If it is possible to override the autopilot then it's a pretty good bet that putting your foot on the accelerator would do it. It's hard to really imagine this scenario where that wouldn't result in the car going into manual mode. Surely would be more dangerous if you couldn't override the autopilot.
Yes, that’s how cruise control works. So it’s just cruise control right?….~right?~
Well it's cruise control, plus lane control, plus emergency braking. But it wasn't switched on so whether or not Tesla are been entirely honest with their advertising (for the record they are not been honest) isn't relevant in this case.
Normally, cruise control isn't turned off by acceleration. It's turned off by braking.
Never said they weren't wrong for lieing. Just that this case seems a poor match for showing that.
There are other cars on the market that use technology that will literally override your input if they detect that there is a crash imminent. Even those cars do not claim to have autopilot and Tesla has not changed their branding or wording which is a lot of the problem here.
I can't say for sure that they are responsible or not in this case because I don't know what the person driving then assumed. But if they assumed that the "safety features" (in particular autopilot) would mitigate their recklessness and Tesla can't prove they knew about the override of such features, then I'm not sure the court is wrong in this case. The fact that they haven't changed their wording or branding of autopilot (particularly calling it that), is kind of damning here.
Autopilot maintains speed (edit), altitude (end of edit), and heading or flight path in planes. But the average person doesn't know or understand that. Tesla has been using the pop culture understanding of what autopilot is and that's a lot of the problem. Other cars have warning about what their "assisted driving" systems do, and those warnings pop up every time you engage them before you can set any settings etc. But those other car manufacturers also don't claim the car can drive itself.
You mention other cars overriding your input. The most common is the auto breaking when it sees you are going to hit something. But my understanding is that it kicks in when it is already too late to avoid the crash. So it isn't something that is involved in decision making about driving, it is just a saftey feature only relevant in the case of a crash. Just like you don't ram another car because you have a seatbelt, your driving choices aren't affected by this features presence. The other common one will try to remind you to stay in your lane. But it isn't trying to override you. It rumbles the wheel and turns it a bit in the direction you should go. If you resist at all it stops. It is only meant for if you have let go of the wheel or are asleep. So I don't know of anything that overrides driver input completely outside of being too late to avoid a crash.
Some cars brake for you as soon as they think you're going to crash (if you have your foot on the accelerator, or even on the brake if the car doesn't believe you'll be able to stop in time). Fords especially will do this, usually in relation to adaptive cruise control, and reverse brake assist. You can turn that setting off, I believe but it is meant to prevent a crash, or collision. In fact, Ford's Bluecruise assisted driving feature was phantom braking to the point there was a recall about it because it was braking with nothing obstructing the road. I believe they also just updated it so that the accelerator press will override the bluecruise without disengaging it in like the 1.5 update which happened this year.
But I was thinking you were correcting me about autopilot for planes and I was confused.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQJL3htsDyQ
Yeah, the problem is that the US has no consumer protections, and somehow this court is trying to make up for it, but it shouldn't be in such court cases where the driver was clearly not fit to drive a car.