do you think they heard "autopilot" or "full self driving"?

You really think the defense wouldn’t have objected if the wrong term was used, or that the judge would allow its continued use?

I don't think these terms are meaningfully different in the heads of most people.

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.

> 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.

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.

It's also worth mentioning he would have been required to keep his hands on the wheel while using autopilot, or else it starts beeping at you and eventually disables the feature entirely. The system makes it very clear you're still in control, and it will permanently disable itself if it thinks you're not paying attention too many times (you get 5 strikes for your ownership duration).

The strikes reset after a week, they do not persist for the duration of your ownership of the vehicle.

https://www.tesla.com/support/autopilot - section “How long does Autopilot suspension last?”

>you get 5 strikes for your ownership duration).

It isn't ownership of the device disables things against you. That's licensing at best.

The dictionary definition for Americans is:

> 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.

Notably, an aircraft autopilot will NOT avoid hitting anything in its path, or slow down for it, or react to it in any way. It's just that the sky is very big and other aircraft are very small, so random collisions are extremely unlikely.

Airplanes and automobiles differ in a number of ways.

> an aircraft autopilot will NOT avoid hitting anything in its path, or slow down for it, or react to it in any way

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...

Is there any contextual difference between the first instance of cruise control (which has since been relabeled cruise control, perhaps with reason), automatic flight control, and a company whose CEO and fanboys incessantly talk about vehicle autonomy?

That’s why we have a jury.

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.

Couldn't agree more. This thing where words have a common definition and then a secret custom definition that only applies in courts is garbage. Everyone knows what "full self driving" means, either deliver that, come up with a new phrase or get your pants sued off for deceptive marketing.

> Everyone knows what "full self driving" means

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?

The crash took place in 2019, which is the year that FSD went into beta in the model s. Older vehicles were capable of being retrofitted with FSD.

https://www.autopilotreview.com/tesla-now-offering-fsd-hardw...

The car didn't have it. They weren't advertising it at the time of the crash. You couldn't buy it yet. And the upgrades wouldn't ship for months. I think I stand by what I said. Your attempt to make this about FSD seems to be basically a lie, no?

Autopilot is used when referring to a plane (until Tesla started using it as a name for their cruise control that can steer and keep distance).

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.

Did they?

I think you may be overestimating how much average people know about autopilot systems.

Pilot is a relatively high status career. They are always shown taking off and landing in tv shows and movies. I would be surprised if people thought they just sit back and relax the entire time.

Be prepared to be surprised

As is also pointed out ad nauseam, the claims made about autopilot (Tesla) go far beyond the name, partly because they sold a lot of cars on lies about imminent "FSD" and partly because as always Elon Musk can't keep his mouth shut. The issue isn't just the name, it's that the name was part of a full-court-press to mislead customers and probably regulators.

Everyone here seems to think this is a case about full self driving. That product didn't exist yet when the car in question was manufactured. No one was making the claims you believe were made.

> real "autopilot" systems in aircraft (where the term of art comes from!) aren't remotely supervision-free

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.

I can't tell which side of the argument you're on here. The driver in the Tesla case didn't "drop a pen". Your Subaru is a recent car and not a 2018 Tesla Model S (which was launched before the Full Self Driving product everyone here seems to think they're arguing about existed!).

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.

The market Tesla is advertising to is not airplane pilots. It is the general car buying public.

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 cruise control system in cars was released in 1908, before planes and was called a "governor." It maintained throttle position.

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...

"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.