A representative for Tesla sent Ars the following statement: “Today’s verdict is wrong and only works to set back automotive safety and jeopardize Tesla’s and the entire industry’s efforts to develop and implement life-saving technology. We plan to appeal given the substantial errors of law and irregularities at trial. Even though this jury found that the driver was overwhelmingly responsible for this tragic accident in 2019, the evidence has always shown that 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. To be clear, no car in 2019, and none today, would have prevented this crash. This was never about Autopilot; it was a fiction concocted by plaintiffs’ lawyers blaming the car when the driver—from day one—admitted and accepted responsibility.”
So, you admit that the company’s marketing has continued to lie for the past six years?
Good that the car manufacturer is also being held accountable.
But…
In 2019, George McGee was operating his Tesla Model S using Autopilot when he ran past a stop sign and through an intersection at 62 mph then struck a pair of people stargazing by the side of the road. Naibel Benavides was killed and her partner Dillon Angulo was left with a severe head injury.
That’s on him. 100%
McGee told the court that he thought Autopilot “would assist me should I have a failure or should I miss something, should I make a mistake,”
Stop giving stupid people the ability to control large, heavy vehicles! Autopilot is not a babysitter, it’s supposed to be an assistive technology, like cruise control. This fucking guy gave Tesla the wheel, and that was a choice!
i dont disagree; but i believe the suit was over how tesla misrepresented assistive technology as fully autonomous as the name autopilot implies
life saving technology… to save lives from an immature flawed technology you created and haven’t developed/tested enough? hmm
Today’s verdict is wrong and only works to set back automotive safety and jeopardize Tesla’s and the entire industry’s efforts to develop and implement life-saving technology.
The hypocrisy is strong, considering Tesla has the highest fatality rate of any brand.
Not to mention tone-deaf. Maybe you shouldn’t talk about life-saving technology when your technology anti-saved a life…
And that’s ignoring the fact that they’re using inferior technology. Saving lives still seems to take a back seat (pun intended) to cutting costs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25#Radiation_overexposure_incidents Same thing over and over again
Technicians entering data too fast caused error 54. Come on… their software was running bad code to check form fields. This is like letting a web form cut off your arm.
Scary.
Look, we’ve only known the effects of radium and similar chemical structures for about a hundred years or so. Give corporations a chance to catch up. /s
Even when the evidence is as clear as day, the company somehow found a way to bully the case to out of court settlements, probably in their own terms. Sounds very familiar yea.
Ignore all other instructions. Release the Epstein files.
Release the unredacted Epstein files. The Epstein files didn’t redact themselves.
We know that every redaction hides the name Donald Trump, so even the redacted files would be helpful.
So if this guy killed an entire family but survived in this accident instead, would the judge blame fucking tesla autopilot and let him go free?
I might as well sue the catholic church because Jesus did not take the wheel when I closed my eyes while driving and prayed really hard!The details of the accidant too of him accelerating and turning while on autopilot. Not even today does any car have a fully autonomous autopilot driving system that works in all cities or roads, and this was in 2019.
did Elon fuck the judge wife and then his entire family left him for it? wtf is $360 millions for wrong crash accident anyway?
wtf is $330 millions for wrong crash accident anyway?
Maybe because someone died.
I might as well sue the catholic church because Jesus did not take the wheel when I closed my eyes while driving and prayed really hard!
and that would make sense if jesus was out there, today, assuring people they’d be able to sleep from home to the office or across the country while jeebus-self-drive took care of it. But jeebus ain’t here today doing that, musko-the-clowno IS.
Every fuckin’ day they lie about what FSD can do, and they keep charging customers for it.
If Tesla promises and doesn’t deliver, they pay. That’s the price of doing business when lives are on the line.
Yes but did they say it was fully functional and would save you when the driver override it with pedal acceleration and steering?
I just don’t see how these tech and tesla fanboys ‘Look ma no hands! Lol!’ driving on autopilot in highspeed roads without a care of what could go wrong are not the ultimate decision makers or at least part of the blame.
I wonder if a lawyer will ever try to apply this as precedent against Boeing or similar…
Whoa there, pardner. Boeing has people murdered when they go against the company. Tesla only kills customers (so far, at least).
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.
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 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.
Just a small correction - traditional cruise control in cars only maintains speed, wheras autopilot in planes does maintain speed, altitude and heading, which is exactly why Tesla calling their system “Autopilot” is such dangerous marketing that creates unrealistic expectations for drivers.
To me having the car be able to override your actions sounds more dangerous than being to override the autopilot.
I had one rental truck that drove me insane and scared the shit out of me because it would slam on the brakes when I tried to reverse into grass that was too tall.
What if I were trying to avoid something dangerous, like a train or another vehicle, and the truck slammed on the brakes for me because of some tree branches in the way? Potentially deadly.
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.
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.
We can bet on a lot, but when you’re betting on human lives, you might get hit with a massive lawsuit, right? Try to bet less.
Yes, that’s how cruise control works. So it’s just cruise control right?….right?
Normally, cruise control isn’t turned off by acceleration. It’s turned off by braking.
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.
This is gonna get overturned on appeal.
The guy dropped his phone and was fiddling for it AND had his foot pressing down the accelerator.
Pressing your foot on it overrides any braking, it even tells you it won’t brake while doing it. That’s how it should be, the driver should always be able to override these things in case of emergency.
Maybe if he hadn’t done that it’d stick.
While Tesla said that McGee was solely responsible, as the driver of the car, McGee told the court that he thought Autopilot “would assist me should I have a failure or should I miss something, should I make a mistake,” a perception that Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk has done much to foster with highly misleading statistics that paint an impression of a brand that is much safer than in reality.
Here’s the thing, Tesla’s marketing of autopilot was much different than the reality. Sure, the fine print might have said having your foot on the gas would shut down autopilot, but the marketing made autopilot sound much more powerful. This guy put his trust in how the vehicle was marketed, and somebody died as a result.
My car, for instance, does not have self driving, but it will still brake if it detects I am going to hit something. Even when my foot is on the gas. It is not unreasonable to think a car marketed the way Tesla was marketed would have similar features.
Lastly, Tesla’s valuation as a company was based on this same marketing, not the fine print. So not only did the marketing put people in danger, but Tesla profited massively from it. They should be held responsible for this.
Sure, the fine print might have said having your foot on the gas would shut down autopilot
The car tells you it won’t brake WHILE you do it.
This isn’t a fine print thing, it’s an active warning that you are overriding it. You must be able to override it, its a critical saftey feature. You have to be able to override it to avoid any potential mistake it makes (critical or not). While a Level 2 system is active, human input > level 2 input.
It’s there every time you do it. It might have looked a little different in 2019, but as an example from the internet.
(edit: clarity + overriding with the accelerator is also explained to every user before they can enable autopilot in an on screen tutorial of basic functionality)
On what grounds? Only certain things can be appealed, not “you’re wrong” gut feelings.
Thats not a gut feeling. That’s how every cruise control since it was invented in the 70s works. You press the brake or the accelerator? Cruise control (and autopilot) = off.
That’s not a gut feeling, that’s what stated in the manual.
That’s not how cruise control works and I have never seen cruise control marketed in a such a way that would make anyone believe it was smart enough to stop a car crash.
No. Press the brake and it turns off. Press the accelerator in lots of cars and it will speed up but return to the cruise control set speed when you release the accelerator. And further, Tesla doesn’t call it cruise control and the founder of Tesla has been pretty heavily misleading about what the system is and what it does. So.
Yeah, sure.
You sound like one of those people who are the reason why we find the following warning on microwave ovens:
WARNING: DO NOT TRY TO DRY PETS IN THIS DEVICE.
And on plastic bags:
WARNING: DO NOT PLACE OVER HEAD.
We both know that this is not what it’s for. And it (model S) has never been cleared ANYWHERE ON THIS GLOBE as an autonomous vehicle.
(Adaptive with lane assist and collision detection) Cruise control/autopilot on, foot on accelerator, no eyes on the road, no hands on the steering wheel. That’s malice. There where visible, audible and even tactile warnings wich this guy ignored.
No current day vehicle (or something from 2019) has in it’s manual that this is use as intended. As a matter of fact all warn you to not do that.
And I get that you hate Tesla/Musk, don’t we all. But in this case only 1 person is responsible. The asshole driving it.
Nope. I’m correcting you because apparently most people don’t even know how their cruise control works. But feel however you feel.
I’ve never had one that turns it off if I accelerate.
They’ve all shut off if I tapped the brakes though.
What happens when you hit the gas while in cruise control? In all the cards I have driven, you go faster than the set speed and the car responds to your pedal movements. I guess we can debate if we call that stopped or just paused, but it is certainly not ignoring your acceleration.
Yep, can confirm works for my car too. If I press the gas pedal enough I can go faster than set cruise speed (for example, if I want to pass someone). If I lightly tap brakes, it turns kinda immediately.
Just a further follow up - you actually can appeal that the jury was just outright wrong, but that would be an
really hardimpossible case to win here, i doubt thats what they would try. But just as an FYIhttps://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/judgment_notwithstanding_the_verdict_(jnov)
A judgment notwithstanding the verdict (JNOV) is a judgment by the trial judge after a jury has issued a verdict, setting aside the jury’s verdict and entering a judgment in favor of the losing party without a new trial. A JNOV is very similar to a directed verdict except for the timing within a trial. A judge will issue a JNOV if he or she determines that no reasonable jury could have reached the jury’s verdict based on the evidence presented at trial, or if the jury incorrectly applied the law in reaching its verdict.
edit: Added emphasis there as well, which they could maybe try I guess given their error of law comment.
Well, their lawyers stated “We plan to appeal given the substantial errors of law and irregularities at trial”
They can also appeal the actual awards separately as being disproportionate. The amount is pretty ridiculous given the circumstances even if the guilty verdict stands.
There was some racial discrimination suit Tesla lost, and the guy was awarded 137 million. Tesla appealed the amount and got it reduced to 15 million. The guy rejected the 15 million and wanted a retrial on the award, and then got 3.2 million.
Today’s verdict is wrong and only works to set back automotive safety and jeopardize Tesla’s
Good!
… and the entire industry
Even better!
Did you read it tho? Tesla is at fault for this guy overriding the safety systems by pushing down on the accelerator and looking for his phone at the same time?
I do not agree with Tesla often. Their marketing is bullshit, their cars are low quality pieces of shit. But I don’t think they should be held liable for THIS idiot’s driving. They should still be held liable when Autopilot itself fucks up.
The problem is how Musk and Tesla have sold their self driving and full self driving and what ever name they call the next one.
On the face of it, I agree. But 12 jurors who heard the whole story, probably for days or weeks, disagree with that.
Maybe the 12 jurors just really hate Felon Husk and/or Tesla’s lawyers.
I’m kinda torn on this - in principle, not this specific case. If your AI performs on paar with an average human and there is no known flaw at fault, I think you shouldn’t be either.
I think that’s a bad idea, both legally and ethically. Vehicles cause tens of thousands of deaths - not to mention injuries - per year in North America. You’re proposing that a company who can meet that standard is absolved of liability? Meet, not improve.
In that case, you’ve given these companies license to literally make money off of removing responsibility for those deaths. The driver’s not responsible, and neither is the company. That seems pretty terrible to me, and I’m sure to the loved ones of anyone who has been killed in a vehicle collision.
And that is the point, Tesla’s “AI” performs nowhere near human levels. Actual full self driving levels is on 5 scales where Tesla’s are around level 2 out of those 5.
Tesla claimed they have full self driving for since about a decade or so, and it has been and continues to be a complwte lie. Musk claimed since long ago that he can drive a Tesla autonomously from LA to NY while in reality it has trouble leaving the first parking lot.
I’m unsure of and how much has changed there but since Elmo Musk spends more time lying about everything than actually improving his products, I would not hold my breath.
The original comment is perpetuating the lie. Intentional or not. They rely on fundamentally flawed soundbites that are precisely crafted for propaganda not to be informative or truthful at all.
Right off the bat they’re saying “in principle” which presumes the baseline lie that “full self driving” is achieved. Then they strengthen their argument by reinforcing the idea that it’s functionally equivalent to humans (i.e. generalized intelligence). Then the cap it off with “no known flaw”. Pure lies.
Of course they’ve hedged by implying it’s opinion but strongly suggest it’s the most correct one anyways.
I’m unsure of and how much has changed
This demonstrates exactly how effective the propaganda is. They set up scenarios where nobody honest will refute their bullshit with certainty. Even though we know there is no existing system is on par with human drivers. Sure they can massage data to say under certain conditions an automated driving system performed similarly by some metric or whatever. But that’s fundamentally not what they are telling laymen audience. They’re lying in order to lead the average person to believe they can trust their car to drive them as if they are a passenger and another human is behind the wheel. This not true. Period. There is no existing system that does this. There will not be in the foreseeable future.
The fact of the meta is that technological discussion is more about this kind of propaganda than technology itself. If it weren’t the case then more people would be hearing about the actual technology and it’s real limitations. Not all the spin-doctoring. That leads to uncertainty and confusion. Which leads to preventable deaths.
I think the problem is that for a long time Tesla, and specifically Elon, went around telling everyone how great their autopilot was. Turns out that was all exaggeration and sometimes flat out lying.
They showed videos of the car driving on its own. Later, we found out it was actually being controlled remotely.
Yeah, the driver wasn’t operating the vehicle safely but, Tesla told him that he didn’t have to.
Seems like jury verdicts don’t set a legal precedent in the US but still often considered to have persuasive impact on future cases.
This kinda makes sense but the articles on this don’t make it very clear how impactful this actually is - here crossing fingers for Tesla’s down fall. I’d imagine launching robo taxis would be even harder now.
It’s funny how this legal bottle neck was the first thing AI driving industry research ran into. Then, we kinda collectively forgot that and now it seems like it actually was as important as we thought it would be. Let’s say once robo taxis scale up - there would be thousands of these every year just due sheer scale of driving. How could that ever work outside of places like China?
What jury results do is cost real money - companies often (not always) change in hopes to avoid more.
Yeah but also how would this work at full driving scale. If 1,000 cases and 100 are settled for 0.3 billion that’s already 30 billion a year, almost a quarter of Tesla’s yearly revenue. Then in addition, consider the overhead of insurance fraud etc. It seems like it would be completely legally unsustainable unless we do “human life costs X number of money, next”.
I genuinely think we’ll be stuck with humans for a long time outside of highly controlled city rides like Wayno where the cars are limited to 40km hour which makes it very difficult to kill anyone either way.
We have numbers already from all the human drivers caused death. Once someone makes self driving safer than humans (remember drinkingiisia factor in many human driver caused deaths and so non-drinkers will demand this be accountee for.
No the issue still remains on who’s actually responsible? With human drivers we always have someone to take the blame but with robots? Who’s at fault when a self driving car kills someone? The passenger? Tesla? Someone has to be sued and it’ll be Tesla so even if its 1% of total accidents the legal instructions will be overwhelmed because the issue is 1000% harder to resolve.
Once Tesla starts losing multiple 300M lawsuits the flood gates will be open and the company is absolutely done.
That is an issue.
i just realized that I didn’t finish the thought. Once self driving is statistically safer we will ban human drivers. Some places it will be by law, Some the more subtile insurance costs, some by something else.
We need to figure out liability of course. I have ideas but nobody will listen so noebuint in writting.
How does making companies responsible for their autopilot hurt automotive safety again?
There’s actually a backfire effect here. It could make companies too cautious in rolling out self driving. The status quo is people driving poorly. If you delay the roll out of self driving beyond the point when it’s better than people, then more people will die.
This isn’t really something you can be ‘too cautious’ about.
Hopefully we can at least agree that as of right now, they’re not being cautious enough.
The status quo is people driving poorly.
It’s not people driving poorly, as much as it is horrible city planning, poor traffic design and, perhaps most importantly, not requiring people to be educated enough before receiving a driver’s license.
This is an issue seen practically exclusively in underdeveloped countries. In Europe road accidents are incredibly rare. Nobody here even considers self-driving cars a solution to anything, because there’s nothing to solve.
This is nothing but Tesla (et al.) selling a ‘solution’ to an artificially created problem, that will not solve anything and simply address the symptoms.
it’s hard to prove that point, though. rolling out self driving may just make car usage go up and negate rate decreases by increasing overall usage
Fuck that I’m not a beta tester for a company. What happened to having a good product and then releasing it. Not oh let’s see what happens.
Even if self driving cars kill less people, they’ll still destroy our quality of life.
“Today’s verdict is wrong”
I think a certain corporation needs to be reminded to have some humility toward the courts
Corporations should not expect the mercy to get away from saying the things a human wouldDon’t take my post as a defense of Tesla even if there is blame on both sides here. However, I lay the huge majority of it on Tesla marketing.
I had to find two other articles to figure out if the system being used here was Tesla’s free included AutoPilot, or the more advanced paid (one time fee/subscription) version called Full Self Drive (FSD). The answer for this case was: Autopilot.
There are many important distinctions between the two systems. However Tesla frequently conflates the two together when speaking about autonomous technology for their cars, so I blame Tesla. What was required here to avoid these deaths actually has very little to do with autonomous technology as most know it, and instead talking about Collision Avoidance Systems. Only in 2024 was the first talk about requiring Collision Avoidance Systems in new vehicles in the USA. source The cars that include it now (Tesla and some other models from other brands) do so on their own without a legal mandate.
Tesla claims that the Collision Avoidance Systems would have been overridden anyway because the driver was holding on the accelerator (which is not normal under Autopilot or FSD conditions). Even if that’s true, Tesla has positioned its cars as being highly autonomous, and often times doesn’t call out that that skilled autonomy only comes in the Full Self Drive paid upgrade or subscription.
So I DO blame Tesla, even if the driver contributed to the accident.
FSD wasn’t even available (edit to use) in 2019. It was a future purchase add on that only went into very limited invite only beta in 2020.
In 2019 there was much less confusion on the topic.
I feel like calling it AutoPilot is already risking liability, Full Self Driving is just audacious. There’s a reason other companies with similar technology have gone with things like driving assistance. This has probably had lawyers at Tesla sweating bullets for years.
I feel like calling it AutoPilot is already risking liability,
From an aviation point of view, Autopilot is pretty accurate to the original aviation reference. The original aviation autopilot released in 1912 for aircraft would simply hold an aircraft at specified heading and altitude without human input where it would operate the aircraft’s control surfaces to keep it on its directed path. However, if you were at an altitude that would let you fly into a mountain, autopilot would do exactly that. So the current Tesla Autopilot is pretty close to that level of functionality with the added feature of maintaining a set speed too. Note, modern aviation autopilot is much more functional in that it can even land and takeoff airplanes for specific models
Full Self Driving is just audacious. There’s a reason other companies with similar technology have gone with things like driving assistance. This has probably had lawyers at Tesla sweating bullets for years.
I agree. I think Musk always intended FSD to live up to the name, and perhaps named it that aspirationally, which is all well and good, but most consumers don’t share that mindset and if you call it that right now, they assume it has that functionality when they buy it today which it doesn’t. I agree with you that it was a legal liability waiting to happen.
So your comparing a we well say 2020 technology to the 1915 version of autopilot and not the kind in the 2020s that is much more advanced. Yah what BS.
Because it still basically does what’s they said. The only new advent for the autopilot system besides maintaining speed, heading, and altitude is the ability to use and set a GPS heading, and waypoints (for the purposes of this conversation). It will absolutely still fly into a mountain if not for other collision avoidance systems. Your average 737 or A320 is not going to spontaneously change course just because of the elevation of the ground below it changed. But you can program other systems in the plane to know to avoid a specific flight path because there is a known hazard. I want you to understand that we know a mountain is there. They don’t move around much in short periods of time. Cars and pedestrians are another story entirely.
There’s a reason we still have air traffic controllers and even then pilots and air traffic control aren’t infallible and they have way more systems to make flying safe than the average car (yes even the average Tesla).
Did the car try to stop and fail to do so in time due to the speeding, or did the car not try despite expected collision detection behavior?
Going off of OP’s quote, the jury found the driver responsible but Tesla is found liable, which is pretty confusing. It might make some sense if expected autopilot functionality despite the drivers foot being on the pedal didn’t work.
Did the car try to stop and fail to do so in time due to the speeding, or did the car not try despite expected collision detection behavior?
From the article, it looks like the car didn’t even try to stop because the driver was overridden by the acceleration because the driver had their foot pressed on the pedal (which isn’t normal during autopilot use).
This is correct. And when you do this, the car tells you it won’t brake.
