I imagine the jury heard "autopilot" and then assigned blame to the company that called it that.
"[Plaintiffs] claimed Tesla’s Autopilot technology was flawed and deceptively marketed."
"[Plaintiffs] claimed Tesla’s Autopilot technology was flawed and deceptively marketed."
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.
Tesla's self-driving advertising is all fucking garbage and then some George McGee browses Facebook while believing that his car is driving itself.
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.
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...