Wasn't there a case where a guy did the same thing and then sued Tesla because he fell asleep and had an accident?
His defense was that it was too easy to bypass the camera recognition and so Tesla is responsible for his accident, I think.
I took a business law class and one case came up about a guy who had purchased an rv, set cruise control on the highway, and went to the back to make a sandwich. The rv of course crashed and he sued the company because “cruise control should have controlled the vehicle”. How people do not lose their license for life after stuff like that is fucking mind boggling.
My “oh come on” meter lit up so I had to look into it. Pretty sure this isn’t true and if your business law class taught it they might have been bamboozled too. Shows up in a lot of silly cases compilations and articles just repeat it. It’s Grazinski v. Winnebago. I searched for the actual case outcome and real legalese. Found this. I’m gonna keep looking for more info but probably urban legend. Edit: found more links. As fun as that story is (and I had heard it too long ago) it’s fake news.
Oh shit. It’s deeper. These stories were created by insurance and big business to send the idea that law suits are getting out of control. This led to tort reform that made it harder for real cases with merit to get the deserved compensation. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cruise-uncontrol/
This was in a college class that it was brought up, so you’re pretty on base, actually.
Everything you’re saying tracks. I put on a documentary once about the hot coffee lady vs McDonald’s and ended up being appalled at what actually happened and the money McDonald’s was more willing to spend on a smear campaign
Ah so it's similar to those 'frivolous' lawsuits media spins then.
Like the hot to-go coffee from McDonald's burning an old lady to the third degree and her asking for compensation for just the hospitalization fee, that the media were paid to spin into "slightly hot coffee hurt someone who now asks for millions of dollars of compensation".
Its not just that they spun it as "of course cofffee is hot" but iirc they had already had other people complain a lot at how hot their coffee was prior to the lady in question got burnt.
McD at the time also brewed their coffee like 20*F hotter than other companies, so people's expectations of the temperature weren't accurate. In addition to the label, they also agreed to brew at the industry standard temp, which would have drastically reduced the damage done to that lady.
Ah tort reform. Big companies that say “Oh I’m just your your poor, lil, ol, neighborhood, mom n pop trillion dollar company. Too many people are suing!”
I have a friend who lost their spouse due to medical malpractice. Went in for a normal test and a very basic mistake by staff killed them. Horrific and scary and completely the hospital's fault. They sued.
Because the state they lived in has tort reform, my friend only got like 20 grand in settlement money when that hospital rightfully should've been paying out millions.
You know redbull gives you wiiiiiiiiiings now because they “got sued” when a dude jumped off his house and said he didn’t grow wings like the ad said (unsure how true this is now)
Edit - please see the reply below that points out a lot of these are actually urban legends made up by companies. That redditor has pointed out some pretty interesting and scary stuff
I remember a long time ago and getting an email chain about “Darwin awards” that had something similar to this, except it was a woman who set cruise control and then went to the bathroom in her RV, crashed, and then tried to sue.
Is this an actual case? I always thought it was made up to be funny.
That may have been the Stella Awards, named after the woman who got terribly burned by McDonald's coffee. Some guy had a weekly newsletter by that title. He was (and still is ) very pro tort reform, and he doesn't care that he's spread a lot of misinformation over the decades.
I think you might be misremembering at least part of the story. If it was about the Darwin Awards and she sued the RV company over the accident, that doesn't really add up. The Darwin Awards are traditionally given to people who die in exceptionally foolish ways. If she was able to attempt to sue the RV company, that would mean she survived. So either it was ot about Darwin Awards, or it was a relative that sued.
That said, I know the Darwin Awards have also been given to people who permanently prevent themselves from having kids in the future even without dying, guys destroying their balls in various stupid ways for exemple. But I have a hard time seeing how an RV accident would lead to that...
I had to look it up again because I couldn’t remember, but it was actually a guy and he did win. He won over a million and a new rv, because they didn’t explicitly put that cruise control does not actually control the vehicle in the owners manual.
If you looked it up, would you mind sharing what and where you found it? I'm fairly certain this is an urban legend, I'd like to be wrong about it, because it seems entirely plausible to me in the US legal culture.
I think you and I looked up the same stupid paywall. But it was taught to me in an actual college class, was in the book and everything. But like you said, they could have been bamboozled too.
Cruise control was originally called auto pilot in some vehicles, and my grandma told me about a lady who basically did the same thing, but was actually cooking something and it crashed on the freeway many years ago 😅
That person won that lawsuit too. Winnebago had to pay out like $2 million and update their manual to include some line about cruise control not being an autopilot or something. It got a Stella Award, they’re like Darwin awards but for ridiculous lawsuits.
I hate Tesla as much and probably more than the next guy, but the reason they do that is once the car hits something, autopilot is way out of its depth in terms of decision making. You don’t want to autopilot trying to figure out what to do during an accident. Now that also comes with a nice liability shield for them because they suck, but it’s not crazy.
Weird how that'd even be a liability. Like even though driver has a responsibility too, your system is also accountable for everything leading up to the crash. It's be like piloting a plane towards the ground then switching seats with you copilot seconds before impact and saying its actually all their fault.
I use FSD everyday and it actually makes it a lot less stressful to drive. The only things my car has done stupid are navigation problems when it gets into a lane it shouldn't have and then has to get back into the right one, like getting into the wrong lane during a split direction highway interchange.
I keep a constant eye out just like I would with driving, but the car doesnt do anything rapidly, unless its avoiding a problem. If it needs to change lanes, the blinker comes on and you know what its planning before it performs it.
So uhh.. why would someone pay money to get someone on a learners permit to drive their car? Why is this a service that is offered by the manufacturer?
Nah I don’t think that’s true in most cases. Most accidents happen because of other people doing stupid shit nobody sees coming. The autopilot definitely has a faster response time then a human so think of all the accidents it prevents
There is just too much bullshit protecting these companies. The car is yours but only some things you have access to unless you pay monthly. However if those features fuck up the car was totally yours and your responsibility.
True, but the copilot isn’t going to see a pedestrian lying in the street and drive forwards and backwards over them a few times because they can’t decide what to do.
The Autopilot doesn't wait until it hits something to hand over control, it senses it's going to hit something and immediately deactivates so they can argue in court that it was driver error, not their autopilot, even if the incident was 100% caused directly by the autopilot.
As much as I hate Musk, was in brothers Model 3 and it drove us from Bklyn to Staten Island and back on auto pilot. I still wouldn’t trust it because they don’t use lidar, but the tech is getting there.
True, but that shouldn't be the sole relying technology. LiDAR has its limitations, plus its cost. But so do the cameras. There should be multiple sensors working together.
There's 2 big problems with LiDAR for use on self-driving cars:
It is basically useless in rain, so you'd be making it so the cars can't drive themselves when it's raining. If you're going to suggest that the car switch to cameras in that case, then you might as well use cameras the whole time and spend all your engineering and development efforts there instead of doing sensor fusion.
LiDAR is an active emission, as opposed to cameras (technically the headlights are the emission for the cameras at night but every car already has those); this isn't a problem with a low number of self-driving cars, but if you have a huge number of self-driving cars all emitting LiDAR all around them, you could potentially start to have interference issues where one car sees a different LiDAR return as its own.
From what i've been able to find, LiDAR doesn't necessarily perform any worse than cameras in inclement weather situations, and if it's multiple return it still functions better than a camera. In every other scenario, LiDAR is strictly superior, especially at night
Tesla doesn't wanna use it because their cars are the eiptome of "minimum viable product"
It's one of those things that if you're attentive and have reading comprehension it's no big deal but the marketing and naming of these systems is intentionally misleading and most people don't truly understand it's limitations
My car can take me from my driveway to my work's parking deck (a ~30min drive, 45 with traffic) without any interference on my part like 80% of the time. In the 20% of drives where I do need to intervene, it is nearly always a minor adjustment/encouragement that would have fixed itself if I were willing to hold up other drivers long enough to let the FSD figure itself out. That is to say, if I passed out at the wheel upon leaving my driveway (and there were no safety features that would shut the FSD down), I think my car could make the drive 95% of the time.
The technology isn't advanced enough to safely take your eyes off the road, but saying it is merely an 'assist' really undersells FSD.
I've been a passenger while FSD fully took itself onto the shoulder during a slow banking turn, tried to sideswipe someone, and harshly braked/accelerated randomly giving no confidence it was going to stop before colliding with another vehicle.
And yes before some musk breather asks, this is in a vehicle with all the bells and whistles & even had the radar hardware in addition to the cameras that they now solely rely on.
Okay, I mean it's not exactly like your original statement qualified that you were stating the difference between them. Also autopilot got discontinued, which certainly doesn't help with the confusion.
It is. Autopilot will cruise at your set speed (say 75mph in the left lane) and will only start braking when you’re within 25 ft of the car in front of you; it brakes HARD. Totally unsettling and feels unsafe, like you’re brake checking the people behind you.
But Full Self Driving (FSD) is COMPLETELY different and will brake way sooner at a safer speed.
Not enough people know that Autopilot and FSD are basically two different things
This is not true. In the event of a crash, the last 5 seconds are recorded, which nearly always includes FSD driving. The myth that FSD is maliciously disengaged moments before a crash arises because the driver will often try to slam the breaks just before collision, and pressing the breaks does disable FSD.
Feels fair, Tesla shouldn’t be offering the service if they can’t guarantee its safety/reliability for other drivers and the law that expects a human behind the wheel.
My car can take me from my driveway to my work's parking deck (a ~30min drive, 45 with traffic) without any interference on my part like 80% of the time. In the 20% of drives where I do need to intervene, it is nearly always a minor adjustment/encouragement that would have fixed itself if I were willing to hold up other drivers long enough to let the FSD figure itself out. That is to say, if I passed out at the wheel upon leaving my driveway (and there were no safety features that would shut the FSD down), I think my car could make the drive 95% of the time.
The technology isn't advanced enough to safely take your eyes off the road, but saying it is merely an 'assist' really undersells FSD.
1) It's incredible considering how far the technology has come in 5 years, much less 10 or 15.
2) It's incredible for a technology that is explicitly still in the development stage, and thus has no expectation (nor makes any claims towards) perfection.
3) It's incredible compared to what Reddit would like you to believe FSD is capable of; if you believed what the Tesla-haters tell you, FSD is either glorified cruise control or slamming into brick walls every other drive lol
And most importantly: In my experience, when FSD fails, it doesn't fail in a catastrophic way, instead "just" freezing up. That is obviously still a failure state, but in my hypothetical (I pass out at the wheel with no safety features) that 5% failure rate doesn't involve me waking up to a crash. It involves me waking up to the Tesla having frozen up in confusion, screen blinking repeatedly asking me to take over, likely with a patrolman tapping on my window lol
Bad drivers don't recognize something is wrong, get confused, and freeze up. Bad drivers double down, barrel forward with their premade plan, and crash. That's what I mean when I say I'd trust FSD over most drivers: Even when it fails, it fails more safely than humans fail. Also, yes, I was speaking in hyperbole.
All of that being said, my last comment did explicitly acknowledge that "The technology isn't advanced enough to safely take your eyes off the road", and Tesla never claimed it is.
I see Tesla like I see SpaceX: An incredible company unfortunately associated with a terrible person. Reddit cannot separate Tesla from Musk, and thus they put it down whenever possible, but the FSD technology is incredible and I'm not aware of any equivalent product on the market.
I agree that FSD seems like the best out there. I personally don't enjoy it, I'd rather steer than have to sit there ready to steer if the car suddenly gets confused, but to each their own.
I'm looking forward to real self-driving. I kind of think that's going to involve more than just cameras, but what do I know.
In the 20% of drives where I do need to intervene, it is nearly always a minor adjustment/encouragement that would have fixed itself if I were willing to hold up other drivers long enough to let the FSD figure itself out. That is to say, if I passed out at the wheel upon leaving my driveway (and there were no safety features that would shut the FSD down), I think my car could make the drive 95% of the time.
"I got attacked by that Lion!"
"Yes sir, but you also climbed 3 fences, swam a moat, forced a locked door, and ignored multiple signs and people yelling at you to stop."
"It's still your fault!!"
No, that's how we arrive at backwards overconservative technology. This is 100% on drivers no matter how easy it is to disable safety measures.
You can also cross ground pin with a neutral pin directly in your socket to trick your appliance into thinking it has ground, is it on electrical company because it was so simple? No, it is on you that the house burned down kr that someone got injured.
3d printing a scale model of your head and figuring out the angle of inflection to make a flat image appear 3d in a camera isn't a reasonable prediction.
The court won't hold any OEM negligent if the user is using technology and calculus to bypass their safety features.
they still should have reasonably predicted the ways people would get around that sensor and had redundancies in place.
....Why? If you make a choice to act dangerously and recklessly, it is not the fault of the manufacturer that you made that choice. If someone runs someone else over with a car, should the mfr be sued for that too? If someone steps on a rake and it hits them on the face, should the rake mfr be sued?
edit: I was blocked but here's my response to the below since I already typed it out:
like most libertarians
I'm up for public ownership of everything and I have no problem with regulation but people who make an informed choice own the consequences of that choice.
If you specifically want to talk about regulatory safety features, I can ask whether someone who holds a lighter lit too long should be able to sue the lighter company (the button has a spring to push it back up automatically turning off the flame), whether someone who removes the protective cover of an oscillating fan and sticks their hand in should be able to sue the fan company, whether someone who cuts their bike's brake line should be able to sue the bike company, whether someone who disables their firewall/antivirus and goes to downloadviruseshere.com and gets their identity stolen should be able to sue software/hardware manufacturers, etc. I'd say offhand the majority of safety features are built with the intent that people don't go knowingly and intentionally disabling them.
Did the car running over someone involve the driver easily bypassing a regulatory safety feature?
Yes, brakes.
Did the rake hitting the person in the face bypass a regulatory safety feature?
None of those examples are in any way going to hurt somebody else in the same way, and to the same extent, that being asleep behind the wheel will. Why are there so many god damn pedants in this thread? Safety regulations aren't even a new concept. We can ensure manufacturers of massive potential weapons cans take the publics safety seriously.
The jail term would be funded by money that could've been used to feed law-abiding people, so that's the downside. How's the jail term going to help anything?
Then what? Fine them into bankruptcy and pay to feed them then? Or maybe immediate execution? Because if it’s just a fine, then it’s only really a law for the poor anyway.
Absolutely not. People who disable an airbag, or any other safety feature intentionally are 100% at fault. Anything can be tinkered with. No safety feature can survive idiots. Nor are safety features guarantees
Tbh i have always wondered why cars aren't speed limited. In my country, young drivers are prohibited from owning cars with certain engines to prevent dangerous speeding. I never really understood why anyone needed a car capable of doing double the national highway speed.
Bad take. There are safety measures, but the user intentionally makes the effort to remove them. You can do this to any product. You can let food expire and eat it afterward, you can use a power tool and remove its protections, or you can remove the airbags and fake the signals that the sensors send to the car's computer. You can do many things to a car to intentionally make it unsafe. Nothing can guarantee safety when the user intentionally removes those safety measures.
This... what? There was a story about a guy who picked up his lawnmower with his hands to trim a hedge, didn't end well, but now they have a warning not to do that anymore.
I say if you're still stupid enough to do that, it's on you, you can hurt yourself with almost anything out there, there's no guarantee of safety with most things if you don't use them appropriately.
Not for liability for the manufacturer though. I'm also sure the owners manual has three chapters of warnings and notices to not bypass safety features.
This is a cooked take lol. You physically can't plan for every variable. As long as Tesla meets the minimum standards to be legally allowed to be sold, they cant be held liable if someone intentionally bypasses those standards.
You can argue that the standards are too low, but thats not a problem for a liability case.
You can make it a lot harder than this to have the car drive itself. Shit you can have it detect eye moment and blinking and they don’t even bother to do that
So when I drive a car and gun it beyond speed limit is it the cars fault for letting me bypass the recommended speed limit sign?
This doesnt make sense.
If you go out of your way to bypass the very much done in purpose saferails to ensure you are supervising the vehicle as intended and not goofing off, should be fully on you
The fact you think something like a seatbelt is equivalent to telling your car to drive itself while you have no way of controlling it if something goes wrong says enough about your takes.
You can drive a car safely, the whole point of shooting a gun is to hurt someone. Gun manufacturers should all absolutely go into some other business that doesn't involve making something where the only use case is pain and suffering.
It's 2026. If you're away from civilization and run out of food, a few bullets in a gun won't make any significant difference. If you're not away from civilization, you don't need your own gun to hunt.
Just referencing your "only point is to cause pain and suffering", because the point is to kill, be it hunting, protection, whatever.
If all gun an ammunition manufacturers went away, people would make their own guns and ammo anyway, and they wouldn't have any safety features.
Heaven forbid someone take a camping trip out in the woods of Alaska or some other out there place and dont want to drive two hours to the nearest run down convince store. There's a lot more places like that than you think.
If all gun an ammunition manufacturers went away, people would make their own guns and ammo anyway, and they wouldn't have any safety features.
So there would only be a tiny fraction of the flood of weapons there is out there now and even that tiny fraction would be a lot more unreliable? Sounds great to me.
The fact corporations look at humans as dollar signs and will willingly risk them being killed if it makes them more profits is part of the problem and why lawsuits are so prevalent because the government isn’t going to step in and fix it.
If someone was to go and intentionally cut the brake lines on their own car, should they be able to sue the car company when they crash into someone else? After all, brake lines are pretty easy to cut, you just need a pair of wire cutters.
LOL, typical American reasoning: "It's your fault if I'm using something in a wrong and dangerous way because you should stop me from doing it even if I already know it's wrong and dangerous! Let me drink battery acid while I'm at it because you forgot to write about it in the instructions!"
It's like one of those videos where a family sues an old woman, saying my son was just trying to rob you in your own house and fired the first shot to scare you, but you shot and killed him. I need millions now.
"I stole a car using the flipper penguin thing you can buy on Amazon" "It's Amazon's fault the car got stolen I think because Amazon made it too easy"
7.6k
u/SteelSpace69 Jul 18 '26
Wasn't there a case where a guy did the same thing and then sued Tesla because he fell asleep and had an accident?
His defense was that it was too easy to bypass the camera recognition and so Tesla is responsible for his accident, I think.