Tesla Agrees To Settle Class Action Over Autopilot Billed As 'Safer' (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Tesla on Thursday reached an agreement to settle a class action lawsuit with buyers of its Model S and Model X cars who alleged that the company's assisted-driving Autopilot system was "essentially unusable and demonstrably dangerous." The lawsuit said Tesla misrepresented on its website that the cars came with capabilities designed to make highway driving "safer." The Tesla owners said they paid an extra $5,000 to have their cars equipped with the Autopilot software with additional safety features such as automated emergency braking and side collision warning. The features were "completely inoperable," according to the complaint. Under the proposed agreement, class members, who paid to get the Autopilot upgrade between 2016 and 2017, will receive between $20 and $280 in compensation. Tesla has agreed to place more than $5 million into a settlement fund, which will also cover attorney fees.

Comments

So, typical class action result

[CrimsonAvenger]

If you're a member of the class, you get $20 to $280, which is supposed to recompense you for the $5K you spent for the useless software...

The lawyers, of course, get the lion's share of the $5M....

Re:So, typical class action result

[SlaveToTheGrind]

Literally, this settlement was first reported three and a half weeks ago [electrek.co] and it's still making headlines. It's getting ridiculous.

Read your electrek.co article carefully and deliberately. It was based on what they claimed to be a leaked copy of the proposed settlement agreement -- i.e., rumors and innuendo. Today's Reuters article was based on the proposed agreement actually filed with the court -- i.e., what's actually going forward.

Maybe try to back off the conspiracy theories just a touch and leave some room in your mind for critical thinking.

Re: For the math impaired

[roland.c.harrison]

Except that the features were enabled shortly after so the $280 is to compensate them for not having access to them for a short period of time.

The mesmerizing word "Autopilot"

[AlanObject]

I don't wanna get into the business of defending Tesla. Probably they did overhype their technology but I have a peeve with one avenue of criticism.

That is Tesla shouldn't have called it "Autopilot" because it leads buyers to believe that they are buying a self-driving car.

If you buy an airplane these days chances it has an "Autopilot" as well. Any half-trained pilot knows:

1. Autopilots come with different levels of capability.

2. No current commercial autopilot will keep you from flying the plane into the ground. (Fighter jets have this.)

3. No current autopilot will help you if you run out of fuel. If you think it does you will probably die.

4. The autopilot will fly the plane into weather conditions beyond its capability and everybody aboard will die.

5. The autopilot will be perfectly happy flying you into another plane. When this happens you will die and take the other plane with you.

Yet in spite of all these deficiencies they still call it "Autopilot" and have for 50 years or more and I never heard of a class action suit screaming about misleading advertising. Why? Because pilots (and certainly their instructors) pay attention to the product specifications and assign responsibility to the pilot accordingly. They practice using it and don't just expect to punch a button and have everything taken care of.

I suppose this is too much for the flaccid minds of the American consumer to absorb. So we get lawsuits. Well if the product was actually defective then OK or if Telsa lied about what it could do (beyond calling it "Autopilot") then OK but if it just turns out that the purchasers had unrealistic expectations then I hope it gets thrown out of court.

Re:The mesmerizing word "Autopilot"

[uncqual]

You are missing the key point of "autopilot" and the reason it's on boats and planes.

In the case of boats and planes, autopilots, regardless of how "sophisticated" they are, share one attribute -- they allow you to safely take your hands off the controls for significant periods of time (tens of seconds at least) and divert much/most of your attention to other matters (like looking at a chart). This will be preceded by the pilot making some sort of scan of the environment for hazards both fixed and mobile (in particular other boats and planes) by visual identification, radar, charts, etc and/or knowing that rules of the "road" (ATC imposed for planes) will insure a clear route.

Tesla autopilot fails to deliver on this expectation in two ways. First, the environment it is in coupled with its limited capabilities make it impossible to scan the environment in advance for hazards that will be encountered and that Teslapilot can't deal with (which, itself, appears quite difficult to predict). Second, it tends to run into stationary objects (fire engines, fire department maintenance trucks) and even, it appears, sometimes steers the car into them (gore points). If "autopilot" doesn't let you divert any attention from the road and, actually, makes you pay extra attention in case the car decides to steer into a fixed object, it simply is NOT "autopilot" as the typical consumer would expect it to be.

Re:The mesmerizing word "Autopilot"

[hibiki_r]

Forget about the word: A plane's autopilot augments the pilot's capabilities, and there are very clear delineations in when the pilot can safely pay a whole lot less attention, the places where the autopilot is useless, and the places where it's better to let the autopilot do the actual inputs because they are closer to correct than what the pilot will do. There are no 5 second windows from 'not really having to pay attention' to 'death for you and your occupants'.

We also have traditional driver augmentation tech in cars: ABS, automatic emergency braking, basic cruise control, sensors that beep when you are doing something terrible: Neither of those things make paying attention for even an instant safer, but many help in emergency situations.

Look at, instead, Tesla's Autopilot. it does a lot for you in some situations: so much that paying attention while it's doing its thing is difficult: It doesn't really want any input from the driver when things are going well. But things go from going well to catastrophically bad very quickly, and the warnings have proven to come way too late, and that's if they come. It's just not good enough to let to its own devices most of the time, and yet, it will make it harder for the driver to keep attention on the road, as it takes all the mandatory engagement away: It makes zoning out easier, and thus making able drivers worse!

Forget about that flaccid mind rhetoric of yours: It's the equivalent of broken UX, or bad industrial design. Yes, the consumer can make better choices... like never turning the thing on at all, as it's an anti-safety feature. Elon should be ashamed that he is selling it in this state: Self driving cars are the future, but Autopilot is crap. Technologically weaker, yet better thought driver augmentation systems from traditional manufacturers are safer overall.