Tesla's autopilot verdict reveals a glaring flaw

A Miami jury just sided with the humans. The $243 million of damages levied against Tesla Inc. over a fatal Autopilot crash in 2019 represent a black eye for a company that has often successfully blamed human error in prior accidents. It will hopefully be more than that: an impetus to fix a glaring flaw in the drive for ever more automated vehicles.

- Liam Denning Bloomberg

An unusual aspect of this case, Benavides vs Tesla, was that the driver admitted he was at fault, having sped through a stop sign while searching for a dropped cellphone, killing Naibel Benavides Leon and seriously injuring her boyfriend as they stood next to their parked SUV. The jury did indeed blame the distracted driver but assigned him only two-thirds of that blame. The rest was laid on Tesla. Not only must it pay its share of compensatory damages to the victims, amounting to about $43 million, but also $200 million of punitive damages.

During the trial, the driver said that although he knew he was responsible for operating his Model S, he had expected his Autopilot system to help if he made an error. Autopilot combines autosteer and dynamic cruise control and is designed to relieve some of the driver's workload rather than displace it altogether by keeping the vehicle centered in its lane and maintaining a safe distance from vehicles in front when traveling. Ask yourself if that is what springs to mind when you hear the word "autopilot" as opposed to a general sense that such a machine pilots itself. The judge raised that confusion when allowing the case to proceed to trial.