There’s no way this decision stands, it’s absolutely absurd. The guy dropped his phone and was looking down reaching around looking for it when he crashed. He wasn’t supervising autopilot, like you are required to.
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
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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.
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Don'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.
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.
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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.
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