> The company must pay $329 million in damages to victims and survivor, including compensatory and punitive damages.
> A Tesla owner named George McGee was driving his Model S electric sedan while using the company’s Enhanced Autopilot, a partially automated driving system.
> While driving, McGee dropped his mobile phone that he was using and scrambled to pick it up. He said during the trial that he believed Enhanced Autopilot would brake if an obstacle was in the way. His Model S accelerated through an intersection at just over 60 miles per hour, hitting a nearby empty parked car and its owners, who were standing on the other side of their vehicle.
On one hand I don't think you can apply a price to a human life, but on the other 329 million feels too high, especially since Tesla is only partially to blame, it wasn't FSD, and the driver wasn't using the system correctly. Had the system been being used correctly and Tesla was assigned more of the blame, would this be a 1 billion dollar case? This doesn't hold up logically unless I'm missing something, certainly the victim wouldn't be getting fined 329 million if it was decided to be his fault for not looking at the road
> This doesn't hold up logically unless I'm missing something, certainly the victim wouldn't be getting fined 329 million if it was decided to be his fault for not looking at the road
I hope we haven't internalized the idea that corporations should be treated the same as people.
There's essentially no difference $3M and $300M fine against most individuals, but $3M means very little to Tesla. If you want Tesla's behavior to change - and other automakers take notice and not repeat the behavior - then the fine must be meaningful to them.
That's another difference - fining an indivisible is not going to change risks much, the individual's behavior changing is not that meaningful compared to Tesla's behavior changing. And it's not like a huge fine is gonna make a difference in other drivers deciding to be better, whereas other automakers will notice a huge fine.
>I hope we haven't internalized the idea that corporations should be treated the same as people.
Only when it comes to rights. When it comes to responsibilities the corporations stop being people and go back to being amorphous, abstract things that are impossible to punish.
I agree that Tesla should receive punitive damages. And the size of the punitive damages must be enough to discourage bad behavior.
I'm not necessarily sure the victim(s) should get all of the punitive damages. $329 million is a gargantuan sum of money; it "feels" wrong to give a corporation-sized punishment to a small group of individuals. I could certainly see some proportion going toward funding regulatory agencies, but I fear the government getting the bulk of punitive damages would set up some perverse incentives.
I think in the absence of another alternative, giving it to the victim(s) is probably the best option. But is there an even better possible place to disburse the funds from these types of fines?
$300M means very little to Tesla. The stock didn't even drop a bit (other than the usual market fluctuations today). Perhaps $4.20B or $6.90B would've been meaningful. Elon notices these numbers.
> If you want Tesla's behavior to change - and other automakers take notice and not repeat the behavior - then the fine must be meaningful to them.
What behavior do you want them to change? Remove FSD from their cars? It's been nearly 10 years since released and over 3bn miles driven. There's one case where someone died while fetching his cell phone. You would think if it was really dangerous, people would be dying in scores.
This is obviously targeted and the court system should not be playing favorites or going after political opponents
Tesla was found partially liable for this crash. The reason they were liable was they sold something claiming (practically speaking) that it could do something. The customer believed that claim. It failed to do that thing and killed people.
So the question then is - how much did Tesla benefit from claiming they could do this thing? That seems like a reasonable starting point for damages.
And the fine needs to be high enough to prevent them from just saying - oh, well, we can make money if we keep doing it.
If you could only fine a person for committing murder, you wouldn't fine a billionaire $5m, and then hope he wouldn't go on killing everyone he thinks he'd rather have dead than $5m.
> I imagine the jury heard "autopilot" and then assigned blame to the company that called it that.
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.
"Autopilot" isn't even the most egregious Tesla marketing term since that honour goes to "Full Self-Driving", which according to the fine text "[does] not make the vehicle autonomous".
Tesla's self-driving advertising is all fucking garbage and then some George McGee browses Facebook while believing that his car is driving itself.
As gets pointed out ad nauseum, the very first "cruise control" product in cars was in fact called "Auto-Pilot". Also real "autopilot" systems in aircraft (where the term of art comes from!) aren't remotely supervision-free.
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.
> On one hand I don't think you can apply a price to a human life
Yes, although courts do this all the time. Even if you believe this as solely manufacturer error, there are precedents. Consider General Motors ignition switch recalls. This affected 800k vehicles and resulted in 124 deaths.
> As part of the Deferred Prosecution Agreement, GM agreed to forfeit $900 million to the United States.[4][51] GM gave $600 million in compensation to surviving victims of accidents caused by faulty ignition switches
So about $5m per death, and 300m to the government. This seems excessive for one death, even if you believe Tesla was completely at fault. And the fact that this is the only such case (?) since 2019, seems like the fault isn't really on the manufacturer side.
If you you make a manufacturing error without intentionally deceiving your customers through deceptive naming of features, you have to pay millions per death.
If you intentionally give the feature a deceptive name like "autopilot", and then customers rely on that deceptive name to take their eyes off the road, then you have to pay hundreds of millions per death.
The product simply should not be called Autopilot. Anyone with any common sense could predict that many people will (quite reasonably) assume that a feature called Autopilot functions as a true autopilot, and that misunderstanding will lead to fatalities.
> feature called Autopilot functions as a true autopilot
What's a "true autopilot"? In airplanes, autopilot systems traditionally keep heading, altitude, and speed, but pilots are still required to monitor and take over when necessary. It's not hands-off or fully autonomous.
I would argue you are creating a definition of "autopilot" that most people do not agree with.
Anyone who used it knows its limitations. IDK maybe in 2019 it was different tho, now it's full of warnings that make it barely useable when distracted. Ironically you are better off disabling it and staring into your phone, which seems what regulators actually want.
And by the way what is true autopilot? Is the average joe a 787 pilot who's also autopilot master?
Funny that pretty much every car ships with autosteer now. Ones I've used didn't seem to have much warnings, explanations, disclaimers or agreements that pundits here assume it should.
There's two conflicting goals here, Tesla's marketing department would really like to make you think the car is fully autonomous for financial reasons (hence autopilot and full self driving) and then there's Tesla's legal department which would prefer to blame somebody else for their poor software.
> On one hand I don't think you can apply a price to a human life, but on the other 329 million feels too high, (...)
Let me stop you right there. That's not how damages work.
Damages have two goals: compensate victims, and dissuade offenders from repeating the same mistakes. The latter involves punishments that discourage repeat offenses.
That's where these high values come from. They are intended to force the likes of Tesla to not ignore the lives they are ending due to their failures.
If damages were low, the likes of Tesla would do absolutely nothing and absorb them as operational expenses, and continue to cause deaths claiming they are unavoidable.
Once the likes of Tesla are forced to pay significant volumes of cash in damages, they suddenly find motives to take their design problems seriously.
I tend to agree, however the government is not an unincentivized incentivizer. By being able to impose such fines, the government is potentially itself incentivized to not prevent these accidents for they potentially cause this kind of revenue.
There are ways to mitigate this, such as forcing the government to use these revenues in a way that is relevant to the issue at hand, i.e. creating safety jobs, strengthening control authorities, or something else.
You could also say that the amount is insignificant, but that could of course change with every lawsuit, and it of course accumulates. Or one could speculate that the interests are not really monetarily aligned at all (e.g. prisons), or that the judicial system is independent enough to stop propagation of these incentives. I think it is still needed to consider and try to controlledly align these motives between the relevant actors.
The fault with an individual can be reasonably constrained to the one prosecuted death they caused. The fault with "autopilot by Tesla", a system that was marketed and deployed at scale, cannot.
And if you want to draw parallels with individuals, an individual driver's license would be automatically suspended and revoked when found at fault for manslaughter. Would you propose a minimum 1~3 year ban on autopilot-by-Tesla within the US, instead?
329 million is not just compensatory damages (the value of the human life) but also punitive damages. That number floats up to whatever it takes to disincentivize Tesla in the future.
*Punitive damages*. From another article: "They claimed Tesla either hid or lost key evidence, including data and video recorded seconds before the accident." If Tesla is destroying evidence then yeah they ought to feel the pain, and those personally responsible should be charged as well. If you make it cheaper to evade the law than comply, what good is the court at all?
> The case also included startling charges by lawyers for the family of the deceased, 22-year-old, Naibel Benavides Leon, and for her injured boyfriend, Dillon Angulo. They claimed Tesla either hid or lost key evidence, including data and video recorded seconds before the accident.
> Tesla has previously faced criticism that it is slow to cough up crucial data by relatives of other victims in Tesla crashes, accusations that the car company has denied. In this case, the plaintiffs showed Tesla had the evidence all along, despite its repeated denials, by hiring a forensic data expert who dug it up. Tesla said it made a mistake after being shown the evidence and honestly hadn’t thought it was there.
Nothing enrages a judge faster then an attempt to conceal evidence that a court has ordered be turned over during discovery. If this is then I suspect the punitive damages have to do as much about disregard to the legal process as it is the case itself.
I think the conceptually messed up part is, when such an award includes separate components for compensatory damages and punitive damages, the plaintiff receives the punitive damages even if they're part of a much broader class that was impacted by the conduct in question. E.g. how many people's choice to purchase a Tesla was influenced by the deceptive marketing? How many other people had accidents or some damages? I think there ought to be a mechanism where the punitive portion rolls into the beginning of a fund for a whole class, and could be used to defray some costs of bringing a larger class action, or dispersed directly to other parties.
So if I make a lawsuit and prove there is a small possibility my toaster can cause my arm to be cut off, because that’s what it did to me, and win $400,000,000 I should only get $400 if it turns out they sold 1 million units?
It’s not a class action lawsuit. If they want their cash they should sue too. That’s how our system works.
If there's an argument to be made that the damages are too high (I'm not making this argument, to be clear), it might be with the compensatory damages prescribed by the jury at $129 million, but then that begs the question of what the cost of a human life is. Money won't bring someone back, but if you're in a courtroom and forced to calculate this figure, it's better to just overestimate IMO.
But the punitive damages at $200 million are appropriate — it's what the jury thought would be appropriate to discourage Tesla's behaviors.
If anyone's confused about what to expect of autopilot and/or FSD, it's Tesla's doing and they should be getting fined into oblivion for the confusion and risks they're creating.
On the flip side: Penalties should be scaled relative to one's means so that the wealthy (whether people or corporations) actually feel the pain & learn from their mistakes. Otherwise penalties for the wealthy are like a cup of coffee for the average Joe -- just a "cost of business."
I'm also a big proponent of exponential backoff for repeat offenders.
"This doesn't hold up logically unless I'm missing something, certainly the victim wouldn't be getting fined 329 millioon if it was decided to be his fault for not loooking at the road"
There was no "329 million fine"
There was a (a) 59 million compensatory damages award to the representative of the estate of the deceased and (b) 70 million compensatory damages award to her boyfriend who survived
The punitive damages were likley the result of Tesla's misconduct in deliberately concealing evidence, not its percentage of fault in causing the accident
> While driving, McGee dropped his mobile phone that he was using and scrambled to pick it up. He said during the trial that he believed Enhanced Autopilot would brake if an obstacle was in the way. His Model S accelerated through an intersection at just over 60 miles per hour, hitting a nearby empty parked car and its owners, who were standing on the other side of their vehicle.
Hard for me to see this as anything but the driver’s fault. If you drop your phone, pull over and pick it up or just leave it on the floor. Everyone knows, and the car tells you, to pay attention and remain ready to take over.
The argument is that if the driver was in a different vehicle he would have done just that, pulled over and picked it up, but because he believed the Tesla was capable of driving safely on it's own he didn't do so.
Normally I turn the steering wheel when I want to turn my car. If you sold me a car and told me it had technology to make turns automatically without my input then I might let go of the wheel instead of turning it, something I would never have done otherwise. If I then don't turn and slam straight into a wall, am I at fault for trusting what I was sold to be true?
If the driver has heard that their Tesla is capable of autonomous driving, and therefore trusts it to drive itself, there may be a fair argument that Tesla shares in that blame. If it's a completely unreasonable belief (like me believing my 1998 Toyota is capable of self driving) then that argument falls apart. But if Tesla has promoted their self driving feature as being fully functional, used confusing descriptions like "Full Self-Driving", etc, it might become a pretty reasonable argument.
Every time I engage Autopilot in my Model S it admonishes me with a notice in the instrument cluster that I am to keep my hands on the wheel. If I don't make it clear the car that I am there and holding on by applying a little rotational force to the wheel at least every fifteen seconds the car will remind me.
So how does one conclude the that the car is capable of driving itself? Or is the version of Autopilot in the car in question different in this respect?
Autopilot is not autonomous driving and isn't marketed as such; Full Self Driving (FSD) is an extra cost option.
They also said that by putting his foot down on the accelerator, he overrode the feature. He might say he didn't know that's how it worked, but then there's even more fault for performing such a dangerous action not knowing how the thing you think will save you is supposed to be operated.
The model s has terrible phone docks. Don't get me started on cupholders, I'll bet people have drink mishaps all the time that affect driving.
I'm actually kind of serious about this - keeping people's stuff secure and organized is important in a moving car.
I'm surprised the touchscreen controls and retiring of stalks aren't coming under more safetly scrutiny.
With the new cars without a PRND stalk, how can you quickly reverse the car if you nose out too far and someone is coming from the side? will the car reverse or go forward into danger?
And why was his mobile phone in his hand to drop, if he was driving? Most states have laws against mobile device usage while driving, and it was never a responsible thing to do even before the laws were enacted.
Maybe he would have pulled over if the car’s capabilities hadn’t been oversold. Two entities did stupid things: 1) The person by not waiting to pull over because Elon Musk’s false claims, and 2) Tesla via Elon Musk making those false claims.
The case number appears to be 1:21-cv-21940-BB (S.D. Fla.).
I practice in that court regularly. Beth Bloom has a reputation as a good trial judge, so I'm somewhat skeptical of Tesla's claims that the trial was rife with errors. That said, both the Southern District and the Eleventh Circuit are known to frequently and readily lop off sizable chunks of punitive damages awards.
The real battle is just beginning: post-trial motions (including for remittitur) will be due in about a month. Then an appeal will likely follow.
AI system manufacturers want to sell their products by advertising their superhuman reliability, but they don't want to take responsibility for any mistakes. I should mention that I don't have any Tesla cars in my environment, but a friend of mine claimed in 2017 that the car was capable of fully autonomous and safe driving without human intervention. It's interesting how advertising can distort the essence of technology in people's eyes.
My wife and I have 2 teslas, a HW3 and a HW4. Even late last year FSD 12.5 was nowhere near close to being able to drive safely. Any non-straightforward situation (like merging during rush hour) would throw it off, so critical interventions were required at least daily.
Starting with FSD 13 on HW4, which came out last December, it's improved dramatically, and since then in my case it hasn't needed a single critical intervention. I think 12.6 on HW3 is also quite good.
The caveat is that we live in the Bay Area, which has an abundance of Tesla training data. Elsewhere I've heard the experience isn't as good. And of course, even in the Bay Area the reliability needs to get a few orders of magnitude higher to be suitable for fully unsupervised self-driving.
Tesla tried to hide evidence … the jury probably did not like to be lied to by Tesla.
F** around and find out
> The case also included startling charges by lawyers for the family of the deceased, 22-year-old, Naibel Benavides Leon, and for her injured boyfriend, Dillon Angulo. They claimed Tesla either hid or lost key evidence, including data and video recorded seconds before the accident.
> Tesla has previously faced criticism that it is slow to cough up crucial data by relatives of other victims in Tesla crashes, accusations that the car company has denied. In this case, the plaintiffs showed Tesla had the evidence all along, despite its repeated denials, by hiring a forensic data expert who dug it up. Tesla said it made a mistake after being shown the evidence and honestly hadn’t thought it was there.
"Schreiber acknowledged that the driver, George McGee, was negligent when he blew through flashing lights, a stop sign and a T-intersection at 62 miles an hour before slamming into a Chevrolet Tahoe that the couple had parked to get a look at the stars."
Normally, Autopilot does not require your foot on the accelerator. Pressing the accelerator overrides it to make to car move ahead where the autopilot decided to stop. At the time, autopilot would always stop at an intersection, and the driver was supposed to move ahead when it is clear.
For those not aware of the circonstances (as me), here’s Tesla defence:
> 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
There’s lots to blame in auto makers « security marketing » and phone addiction but it seems obvious that driving a 1ton+ vehicle while not constantly looking at the road can lead to bad outcomes.
I’m all in for (mass surveillance) onboard eye tracking. Make it optional with 50% bonus on your car insurance and driving state tax. I see many, many drivers every day that are looking at their phone in very inappropriate moments like intersections and line changes.
If someone wants the circumstances they should read the article, not Tesla’s press release. Here’s what the jury said:
… while McGee was two-thirds responsible for the crash, Tesla also bore a third of the responsibility for selling a vehicle "with a defect that was a legal cause of damage"
Do cars normally allow people to prevent emergency braking with the throttle depressed? I haven't actually tried this for obvious reasons, but if their defense is that the safety mechanisms were disengaged with the throttle being fully depressed...
(Clarified my comment to "prevent" from "override" since overrides broadly exist - per jeroenhd's comment - but it seems in this case the argument was that the feature never engaged)
Many automatic safety features do allow user overrides, either by braking (hard) or by accelerating (fast). You may find that your accelerator pedal is harder to press than normal, or that full throttle doesn't do what it normally does. If a normal car does a Tesla and starts doing an emergency brake in the middle of the freeway for no reason, you want the driver to be able to intervene.
Readit News
> A Tesla owner named George McGee was driving his Model S electric sedan while using the company’s Enhanced Autopilot, a partially automated driving system.
> While driving, McGee dropped his mobile phone that he was using and scrambled to pick it up. He said during the trial that he believed Enhanced Autopilot would brake if an obstacle was in the way. His Model S accelerated through an intersection at just over 60 miles per hour, hitting a nearby empty parked car and its owners, who were standing on the other side of their vehicle.
On one hand I don't think you can apply a price to a human life, but on the other 329 million feels too high, especially since Tesla is only partially to blame, it wasn't FSD, and the driver wasn't using the system correctly. Had the system been being used correctly and Tesla was assigned more of the blame, would this be a 1 billion dollar case? This doesn't hold up logically unless I'm missing something, certainly the victim wouldn't be getting fined 329 million if it was decided to be his fault for not looking at the road
I hope we haven't internalized the idea that corporations should be treated the same as people.
There's essentially no difference $3M and $300M fine against most individuals, but $3M means very little to Tesla. If you want Tesla's behavior to change - and other automakers take notice and not repeat the behavior - then the fine must be meaningful to them.
That's another difference - fining an indivisible is not going to change risks much, the individual's behavior changing is not that meaningful compared to Tesla's behavior changing. And it's not like a huge fine is gonna make a difference in other drivers deciding to be better, whereas other automakers will notice a huge fine.
Only when it comes to rights. When it comes to responsibilities the corporations stop being people and go back to being amorphous, abstract things that are impossible to punish.
I'm not necessarily sure the victim(s) should get all of the punitive damages. $329 million is a gargantuan sum of money; it "feels" wrong to give a corporation-sized punishment to a small group of individuals. I could certainly see some proportion going toward funding regulatory agencies, but I fear the government getting the bulk of punitive damages would set up some perverse incentives.
I think in the absence of another alternative, giving it to the victim(s) is probably the best option. But is there an even better possible place to disburse the funds from these types of fines?
Deleted Comment
What behavior do you want them to change? Remove FSD from their cars? It's been nearly 10 years since released and over 3bn miles driven. There's one case where someone died while fetching his cell phone. You would think if it was really dangerous, people would be dying in scores.
This is obviously targeted and the court system should not be playing favorites or going after political opponents
So the question then is - how much did Tesla benefit from claiming they could do this thing? That seems like a reasonable starting point for damages.
If you could only fine a person for committing murder, you wouldn't fine a billionaire $5m, and then hope he wouldn't go on killing everyone he thinks he'd rather have dead than $5m.
On most other places you'd see it paying hundreds of millions in fines and a few millions in damages.
"[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.
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.
Yes, although courts do this all the time. Even if you believe this as solely manufacturer error, there are precedents. Consider General Motors ignition switch recalls. This affected 800k vehicles and resulted in 124 deaths.
> As part of the Deferred Prosecution Agreement, GM agreed to forfeit $900 million to the United States.[4][51] GM gave $600 million in compensation to surviving victims of accidents caused by faulty ignition switches
So about $5m per death, and 300m to the government. This seems excessive for one death, even if you believe Tesla was completely at fault. And the fact that this is the only such case (?) since 2019, seems like the fault isn't really on the manufacturer side.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch...
If you intentionally give the feature a deceptive name like "autopilot", and then customers rely on that deceptive name to take their eyes off the road, then you have to pay hundreds of millions per death.
Makes sense to me.
What's a "true autopilot"? In airplanes, autopilot systems traditionally keep heading, altitude, and speed, but pilots are still required to monitor and take over when necessary. It's not hands-off or fully autonomous.
I would argue you are creating a definition of "autopilot" that most people do not agree with.
And by the way what is true autopilot? Is the average joe a 787 pilot who's also autopilot master?
Funny that pretty much every car ships with autosteer now. Ones I've used didn't seem to have much warnings, explanations, disclaimers or agreements that pundits here assume it should.
Let me stop you right there. That's not how damages work.
Damages have two goals: compensate victims, and dissuade offenders from repeating the same mistakes. The latter involves punishments that discourage repeat offenses.
That's where these high values come from. They are intended to force the likes of Tesla to not ignore the lives they are ending due to their failures.
If damages were low, the likes of Tesla would do absolutely nothing and absorb them as operational expenses, and continue to cause deaths claiming they are unavoidable.
Once the likes of Tesla are forced to pay significant volumes of cash in damages, they suddenly find motives to take their design problems seriously.
There are ways to mitigate this, such as forcing the government to use these revenues in a way that is relevant to the issue at hand, i.e. creating safety jobs, strengthening control authorities, or something else.
You could also say that the amount is insignificant, but that could of course change with every lawsuit, and it of course accumulates. Or one could speculate that the interests are not really monetarily aligned at all (e.g. prisons), or that the judicial system is independent enough to stop propagation of these incentives. I think it is still needed to consider and try to controlledly align these motives between the relevant actors.
Let me stop you right there. Just the compensatory damages were 129 million. And most of that was charged to the driver, no corporate boost there.
And if you want to draw parallels with individuals, an individual driver's license would be automatically suspended and revoked when found at fault for manslaughter. Would you propose a minimum 1~3 year ban on autopilot-by-Tesla within the US, instead?
> The case also included startling charges by lawyers for the family of the deceased, 22-year-old, Naibel Benavides Leon, and for her injured boyfriend, Dillon Angulo. They claimed Tesla either hid or lost key evidence, including data and video recorded seconds before the accident.
> Tesla has previously faced criticism that it is slow to cough up crucial data by relatives of other victims in Tesla crashes, accusations that the car company has denied. In this case, the plaintiffs showed Tesla had the evidence all along, despite its repeated denials, by hiring a forensic data expert who dug it up. Tesla said it made a mistake after being shown the evidence and honestly hadn’t thought it was there.
-https://lasvegassun.com/news/2025/aug/01/jury-orders-tesla-t...
Nothing enrages a judge faster then an attempt to conceal evidence that a court has ordered be turned over during discovery. If this is then I suspect the punitive damages have to do as much about disregard to the legal process as it is the case itself.
It’s not a class action lawsuit. If they want their cash they should sue too. That’s how our system works.
But the punitive damages at $200 million are appropriate — it's what the jury thought would be appropriate to discourage Tesla's behaviors.
Not only we can, but it also done routinely. For example, see this Practical Engineering video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQbaVdge7kU
I'm also a big proponent of exponential backoff for repeat offenders.
Deleted Comment
There was no "329 million fine"
There was a (a) 59 million compensatory damages award to the representative of the estate of the deceased and (b) 70 million compensatory damages award to her boyfriend who survived
The punitive damages were likley the result of Tesla's misconduct in deliberately concealing evidence, not its percentage of fault in causing the accident
HN front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44787780
Why would Tesla conceal evidence. That question is left as one for the reader
Indeed, the HN commenter missed several things
Dead Comment
Hard for me to see this as anything but the driver’s fault. If you drop your phone, pull over and pick it up or just leave it on the floor. Everyone knows, and the car tells you, to pay attention and remain ready to take over.
Normally I turn the steering wheel when I want to turn my car. If you sold me a car and told me it had technology to make turns automatically without my input then I might let go of the wheel instead of turning it, something I would never have done otherwise. If I then don't turn and slam straight into a wall, am I at fault for trusting what I was sold to be true?
If the driver has heard that their Tesla is capable of autonomous driving, and therefore trusts it to drive itself, there may be a fair argument that Tesla shares in that blame. If it's a completely unreasonable belief (like me believing my 1998 Toyota is capable of self driving) then that argument falls apart. But if Tesla has promoted their self driving feature as being fully functional, used confusing descriptions like "Full Self-Driving", etc, it might become a pretty reasonable argument.
So how does one conclude the that the car is capable of driving itself? Or is the version of Autopilot in the car in question different in this respect?
Autopilot is not autonomous driving and isn't marketed as such; Full Self Driving (FSD) is an extra cost option.
Deleted Comment
Also this doesn't stand water today as all new cars have some basic autosteer.
I'm actually kind of serious about this - keeping people's stuff secure and organized is important in a moving car.
I'm surprised the touchscreen controls and retiring of stalks aren't coming under more safetly scrutiny.
With the new cars without a PRND stalk, how can you quickly reverse the car if you nose out too far and someone is coming from the side? will the car reverse or go forward into danger?
It passes a classic “but for…” test in causality.
33% liable
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/01/tesla-must-pay-329-million-i...
I practice in that court regularly. Beth Bloom has a reputation as a good trial judge, so I'm somewhat skeptical of Tesla's claims that the trial was rife with errors. That said, both the Southern District and the Eleventh Circuit are known to frequently and readily lop off sizable chunks of punitive damages awards.
The real battle is just beginning: post-trial motions (including for remittitur) will be due in about a month. Then an appeal will likely follow.
Starting with FSD 13 on HW4, which came out last December, it's improved dramatically, and since then in my case it hasn't needed a single critical intervention. I think 12.6 on HW3 is also quite good.
The caveat is that we live in the Bay Area, which has an abundance of Tesla training data. Elsewhere I've heard the experience isn't as good. And of course, even in the Bay Area the reliability needs to get a few orders of magnitude higher to be suitable for fully unsupervised self-driving.
F** around and find out
> The case also included startling charges by lawyers for the family of the deceased, 22-year-old, Naibel Benavides Leon, and for her injured boyfriend, Dillon Angulo. They claimed Tesla either hid or lost key evidence, including data and video recorded seconds before the accident.
> Tesla has previously faced criticism that it is slow to cough up crucial data by relatives of other victims in Tesla crashes, accusations that the car company has denied. In this case, the plaintiffs showed Tesla had the evidence all along, despite its repeated denials, by hiring a forensic data expert who dug it up. Tesla said it made a mistake after being shown the evidence and honestly hadn’t thought it was there.
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2025/aug/01/jury-orders-tesla-t...
Autopilot requires you to have your foot on the accelerator? That seems weird to me.
> 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
There’s lots to blame in auto makers « security marketing » and phone addiction but it seems obvious that driving a 1ton+ vehicle while not constantly looking at the road can lead to bad outcomes.
I’m all in for (mass surveillance) onboard eye tracking. Make it optional with 50% bonus on your car insurance and driving state tax. I see many, many drivers every day that are looking at their phone in very inappropriate moments like intersections and line changes.
… while McGee was two-thirds responsible for the crash, Tesla also bore a third of the responsibility for selling a vehicle "with a defect that was a legal cause of damage"
(Clarified my comment to "prevent" from "override" since overrides broadly exist - per jeroenhd's comment - but it seems in this case the argument was that the feature never engaged)
I was grateful for it, and at first glance, assuming Tesla’s argument is true, it’s hard to see how they are even partially responsible.