Tesla has to pay historic $243M judgement over Autopilot crash, judge says
electrek.co
electrek.co
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?
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".
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.
The average person does know what an autopilot does, they're just wrong.
I think the example you provided supports that.
For an IFR checkride, if you do it in an aircraft equipped with autopilot, at least one approach will have to be flown with the autopilot.
Not sure if that’s made it’s way to the PPL checkride (or been codified) but it’s inevitable.
There's also a (stupid, imo) tendency for APs to conveniently become inop right before a checkride. It's not accurate to say that all pilots, or even all pilots that have taken an IR ride, are "pilots who understand the capabilities and limits of aviation autopilot technology."
But yes, I understand what you mean.
In the fleet at the school I was learning in (Cessna 162) only one plane had an autopilot, which meant nobody practiced with it, so they never scheduled this plane for a check ride.
But then again even on HN people like parent think that autopilot is the same as full self driving, when it is and always has been just smarter cruise control. The payout was for autopilot (a feature that most new cars have these days under various names), not full self driving.
That is absolutely not true. A plane on autopilot can land itself except for applying the brakes.
If you are trying to claim that all autopilots come with auto landers, thats absolutely not true. Even most, and again, they are always separate systems even if the auto lander can access the same servos used by the autopilot. Additionally, autolanders, unlike the autopilot, require the runways to support it (well, the ones used on commercial airplanes where it’s used sometimes in low visibility situations).
I really think only a few people on HN don’t get that autopilots are actually very much simple systems that have been around forever and do one thing well (keep the plane going in one direction at a specific altitude and speed).
That is absolutely false.
A 20 year old avionics suite in General Aviation (GTN 450) does much more than maintain altitude, speed & heading - you input a flight plan including an approach, it will fly the flight plan, capture the approach signals (VOR/localiser/whatever - which is far more complex than “keeping course”) all the way down to approach minimums.
It can go down to 200ft for an LPV approach.
Pilots undergo rigorous training with exam after exam they must pass.
No one is handed the keys to a Boeing 747 after some weekly evening course and an hours driving test.
To me, it's reasonable to assume that the "autopilot" in a car I drive (especially back in 2019) is going to defer to any input override that I provide. I wouldn't want it any other way.
With Robotaxi it will get even higher as it will be clear 100% the company's fault.
1. Insurance companies price in the risk, and insurance pricing absolutely influences manufacturers (see the absolute crap that the Big 3 sold in the 70s) 2. The government can force a recall based on a flaw whether or not the manufacturer agrees
How excusable is it that maybe it's the narrator misunderstanding it, or making stuff up while talking to the lady?
[1] https://electrek.co/2025/08/04/tesla-withheld-data-lied-misd... [2] https://www.pcmag.com/articles/hacker-who-helped-score-243-m...
Not almost. It IS criminal. And if plebeians like us did that, the judge would toss us in jail without blinking.
What's the difference? And does it matter?
Both are misleadingly named, per the OP:
> 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.”
> 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.
> 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.
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)
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)
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).
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.
So to answer your question, "What's the difference" – it's huge. And I think they've covered that in earlier court cases.
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.
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.
Levels of safety are another consideration, car autopilot’s don’t use multiple levels of redundancy on everything because they can stop without falling out of the sky.
It's trivially easy to fly a plane in straight level flight, to the extent that you don't actually need any automation at all to do it. You simply trim the aircraft to fly in the attitude you want and over a reasonable timescale it will do just that.
That seemingly shifts the difficulty from the autopilot to the airframe. But that’s not actually good enough, it doesn’t keep an aircraft flying when it’s missing a large chunk of wing for example. https://taskandpurpose.com/tech-tactics/1983-negev-mid-air-c...
Instead, you’re talking about the happy path and if we accept the happy path as enough there’s the weekend equivalents of self driving cars built using minimal effort, however being production worthy is about more than being occasionally useful.
Autopilot is difficult because you need to do several things well or people will defiantly die. Self driving cars are far more forgiving of occasional mistakes but again it’s the or people die bits that makes it difficult. Tesla isn’t actually ahead of the game, they are just willing to take more risks with their customers and the general public’s lives.
I would say not, no.
It's almost impossible to crash a plane. There's nothing to hit except the ground, and you stay away from that unless you really really mean to get close.
It's very easy to crash a car, and if you do that most of the time you'll kill people outside the car, often quite a lot of them.
There are no production aircraft fitted with autopilots that can correct for breaking a wing off.
In a hypothetical Tesla style let’s take more risk approach, buggy autopilots can surprisingly quickly get into a situation at cruising altitude which isn’t recoverable before hitting the ground. What is the worst possible thing an autopilot could do in this situation is eye opening here.
> There are no production aircraft fitted with autopilots that can correct for breaking a wing off.
That was a production aircraft still in service. https://simpleflying.com/how-many-f-15-eagles-are-still-in-s...
Granted that specific case depends on the aircraft being a lifting body etc so obviously doesn’t extend to commercial aviation. But my point was lack of aerodynamic stability on its own isn’t enough that giving up is ok.
"Contributed to", in the sense that the pilots decided to just blindly trust the autopilot and let it make a developing situation worse rather than, oh I don't know, maybe FLYING THE DAMN PLANE.
> buggy autopilots can surprisingly quickly get into a situation at cruising altitude which isn’t recoverable before hitting the ground
If you allow the autopilot to fly the plane into the ground, yes. If you're paying attention you ought to be able to recover just about anything, if most of the plane is still working. The vast majority of incidents where aircraft have departed controlled flight and crashed are because the pilots lost sight of the important thing - FLYING THE DAMN PLANE.
> But my point was lack of aerodynamic stability on its own isn’t enough that giving up is ok.
It's got nothing to do with aerodynamic stability. If you adjust the steering and suspension in a car correctly, it'll drive in a perfectly straight line with no user input for a surprisingly long way. With modern electronic power steering and throttle-by-wire systems it's actually surprisingly easy to turn an off-the-shelf car (even something cheap, secondhand, and quite old like a 2010s Vauxhall Corsa) into a simple line-following robot like we used to build at uni in the 80s and 90s in robotics class. Sure, you need a disused aerodrome to play with it, but it'll work.
There is the far greater problem that self-driving cars have to cope with a far more rapidly changing environment than an aircraft. A self-flying plane would be far easier to get right than a self-driving car.
A human driver can't just react, painfully slowly, in the way that current "self-driving" cars do, they have to anticipate and be "reacting" before the problem even begins to start. You do it yourself, even if you don't realise it. You hang back from that car because you know they're going to - there, right across two lanes, not so much as a glance in their mirror, what did I tell you? - they're going to do something boneheaded. That car's just pulled in, the passenger in the back is about to open their door right into your - nicely done, you moved out to the line and missed them by 50cm at least.
Self-driving cars can't do that, and probably never will. Self-flying aircraft won't need to do that.
And an autopilot is a surprisingly simple device that responds in simple and predictable ways to sensor inputs.
Excuses don’t save lives. You can’t trust pilots or drivers to always make the correct decision instantly. Any system designed in such a manner will get people killed.
> If you allow the autopilot to fly the plane into the ground, yes.
Things can be unrecoverable a full minute before impact. There’s some seriously harrowing NTSB reports, and that’s just what’s already happened possible failure modes are practically endless.
Okay, so what's your answer? Stick yet another computer in to go wrong and fly the plane into the ground when it gets the wrong idea about a situation? Add yet more sensors to the car to prevent the driver steering away from an obstacle because it thinks they're not using their indicators yet?
> Things can be unrecoverable a full minute before impact.
Can you find an example of one that isn't down to gross mechanical failure, or just plain Operator Idiocy?
I’m not condemning the airline industry here, the safety conscious approach has done a good job over time especially in terms of redundancy. A major area of improvement is the way autopilots are communicating with pilots, but that’s a hard process.
The car industry isn’t doing nearly as well in terms of redundancy etc so there’s many obvious areas of improvement through solid engineering without changing anything fundamental. That said, communication is again lacking.
> Can you find an example of one that isn't down to gross mechanical failure, or just plain Operator Idiocy?
Operator Idiocy isn’t some clearly defined line, an aircraft with a moderate fuel leak can look like idiocy after the fact but it’s an easy mistake to make. That’s exactly the kind of thing autopilots could catch not just from fuel sensors but how the flight characteristics change as the aircraft gets lighter, but aircraft have happily flown into trouble over the ocean.
Can you elaborate? My very limited knowledge but of very real airplane autopilots in little Cessna and Pipers is that they are in fact far easier than cars - they are a simple control feedback loop that maintains altitude and heading, that's it. You can crash into ground, mountain, or other traffic quite cheerfully. I would not be surprised to find adaptive cruise in cars is far more complex of a system than basic aircraft "autopilot".
FSD has much more sophisticated features, explicitly handling traffic stops and lights. I would not expect the sort of accident to happen with FSD.
The fact that Tesla misleads consumers is a different issue from Autopilot and FSD being different.
Thanks for explaining why labeling it "Autopilot" is misleading and deceptive.
FSD at one point had settings for whether it could roll through stop signs, or how much it could exceed the speed limit by. I've watched it interpret a railroad crossing as a weirdly malfunctioning red light with a convoy of intermittent trucks rolling by. It took the clearly delineated lanes of a roundabout as mere suggestions and has tried to barrel through them in a straight line.
I'd love to know where your confidence stems from.
"would not expect" is the way a cautious person demonstrates a lack of confidence.
Reaching down to grab your phone is stupid and clearly negligent but quite different than making the decision to intentionally run a light.
I suspect it is technologically feasible to design a Tesla to detect: (i) someone is sitting in the driver's seat (seatbelt systems detect that for years); (ii) hands are on the steering wheel; (iii) the driver is attentive (not asleep and is actively monitoring the road).
Are Tesla vehicles designed to blare a loud annoying sound for as long as the system fails to detect an attentive driver?
> Ask the CEO? Based on recent incentives and acquisitions, are they planning to remain a car company?
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.
Tesla was never a car company, their real product is sci-fi dreams.
though they did update the model y (looks like a duck), they just cancelled the model S and X
That's like paying for a "self-juicing juicer" that only works with proprietary juice packages sold through an overpriced subscription.
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.
For luxury car owners or people who want the statement, subscriptions are good way to capture additional payment. Since if customers wanted to pick the cheapest option, they would have already picked something else.
Waymo on the other hand has a level 4 system, and has for many years, in many cities, with large service areas.
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)
If you want to call this "autonomous" well then we are arguing semantics. But I think colloquially, autonomous means "no human".
By the fact that they don't have autonomous driving. And this very judgement demonstrates that.
If you have to keep your full attention on the road at all times and constantly look out for the 10% case where the autopilot may spectacularly fail, it instantly turns off the vast majority of prospective users.
Funny enough the tech that Musk's tweets and the Tesla hype machine has been promising for the last decade is actually on the streets today. It's just being rolled out by Waymo.
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.
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.
(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.)
Tesla Model 3 highest overall in owner satisfaction.
"Left in the dust?"
That's why Chevy has a bunch from them, including "Highest initial quality"
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.
Businesses also claim that, all the time. We need some evidence.
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.
My read is that people overpowered the safety interlock, after which the lid (predictably) flew off, and they were injured (mostly by the hot steam and bits of food). I think it's ridiculous for people to expect safety mechanisms to be impossible to bypass, but maybe you disagree!
And you obviously think doing so was next to impossible therefore Instant Pot shouldn't be liable.
But what evidence do you have of the difficulty of bypassing that specific safety mechanism?
I originally read the documents to understand whether the unit I own is safe, and believed in its safety strongly enough that I have continued to use it.
Because I'd bet you that the jury certainly did.
Should they compensate the victims of such accidents? Of course. Should they pay out the equivalent of winning the lottery? That seems a bit much.
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.
Almost all of these eye watering fines get reduced in further legal action. This has even happened to Tesla before with their news-making hostile workplace suit.
> 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.
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.
It seems clear that "autopilot" was a boisterous overclaim of its capabilities that led to people dying.
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 Autopilot seems to mostly drive hubris. The fine print says you're still supposed to maintain control. They don't have as sophisticated sensors as competitors because Elon decreed "humans don't have LiDAR, so we don't need to pay for it."
Nobody is saying it has to be perfect, but Tesla hasn't demonstrated that it's even trying.
So... informally, "Tesla Co-Pilot" => "You're still the pilot but you have a helper", vs "Tesla Autopilot" => "Whelp, guess I can wash my hands and walk away b/c it's AuToMaTiC!"
...it's tough messaging for sure, especially putting these powertools into peoples hands with no formal training required. Woulda-coulda-shoulda, similar to the 737MAX crashes, should "pilots" of Teslas required training in the safety and navigation systems before they were "licensed" to use them?
The appeal will go to the 11th circuit.
"""Results. At a discount rate of 3 percent, males and females aged 20-24 have the highest PVLE — $1,517,045 and $1,085,188 respectively. Lifetime earnings for men are higher than for women. Higher discount rates yield lower values at all ages."""
Your mother's life might be worth $100 billion+ to you, but that doesn't mean her accidental death will make you into Elon's neighbor.
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.
So in general its not worth appealing for 5 years unless they think they will knock off 25-30% of the judgement.
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.
> Tesla has indicated it will appeal the verdict to a higher court.
My current bet is that optimus will fail spectacularly and Tesla gets left far behind as Rivian's R2 replaces it.
One thing I will note: I know folks that work at TSLA. Musk is more of a distraction. If he goes and if competent leadership is brought in, there's still enough people and momentum to make something happen...
You’re a lot more optimistic about this than I am.
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).
Perfectly isn’t a descriptor I would use. But this is just anecdotal.
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".