Tesla Ordered To Pay $115,000 For Model X Autopilot Failure
Tesla and CEO, Elon Musk, are getting a lot of media attention at the moment, and unfortunately not for the best reasons.
To add onto the Elon Musk and Twitter lawsuits, Tesla employee lawsuits and, production issues, the electric car company have now had to pay out $115,000 for a customers faulty Model X. A court in Munich, Germany, has ordered the company to pay out as the customers autopilot function didn’t navigate the city streets and the phantom braking was a “massive danger” to traffic safety.
According to local reports, the judge did not agree with Tesla’s argument that the autopilot was never designed for that environment. The judge ruled that Tesla cannot expect customers to turn the autopilot system off themselves as this would distract them too much from driving.
Lots of people may be reading this thinking that if their autopilot system fails then they will be in line for a big payout. However, Germany does not use the system of common law and does not rely on any legal precedents. They treat everything on a case by case basis.
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been looking over data from accidents which they feel indicates that the autopilot system in Teslas undermines driver supervision. They are currently looking into recalling Tesla vehicles that have the full self-drive system.
Aside from the case in Germany, Tesla is about to release v10.13 beta to customers who have a high safety score on their system, which was around 100,000 when the numbers were last released. Hopefully, for Tesla’s sake, there are no further issues or bugs with this.
