German court orders Tesla to refund Model X owner over Autopilot issues

Not a good day for Tesla - it’s the second time it lost a case in German court against an owner of the car who claimed that Autopilot does not work as advertised. Only a few months ago an owner of Tesla Model 3 took the company to court over the self-driving features underperformance and the company was ordered to buy the car back.

Now another owner, this time of Model X, has ended up in a similar situation. The owner argued that the Autopilot on her brand new Model X did not work as it should and that it was in fact dangerous. The court had the car examined and tested and the conclusions were, shall we say, controversial?

During the testing it was proven that the car could not properly and safely navigate certain obstacles, it had serious problems with narrowing roads and construction areas. The well documented “phantom braking” reared its ugly head again as well. The court ruled that the problems with this technology pose a massive hazard to safety of passengers and pedestrians in populated areas.

It has to be said that the Autopilot is not designed for heavily populated areas and it is not supposed to be used in such circumstances. It is purely meant for driving on motorways for now. However, the court decided that it shouldn’t be a driver’s responsibility to remember to switch the system off when entering a populated area or leaving the motorway. Switching the Autopilot off can apparently be dangerous.

Autopilot is meant as an assistance system for highway driving, the upcoming FSD is for city streets. Many people are using the FSD Beta which comes with a subscription and long list of “dos and don’ts” and the driver needs a nearly perfect safety score before FSD can be engaged. If during the Beta driver exceeds the speed limits or doesn’t follow the instructions given by the system - FSD is disengaged and withdrawn from the driver. Especially painful after paying a full upgrade price for it of $12,000.

Elon Musk is promising the FSD is nearly ready and will be released into the wild soon. That’s in the US of course because European customers will have to wait for it much longer, the Tesla CEO admitted the European roads and traffic are quite a challenge for the system.

For now Tesla has been issued with another order to reimburse the owner of Model X and the company will pay for legal costs as well. Not an ideal situation but at the same time did we really need a court to tell us the Autopilot is not ready for complex situations? It’s a solid piece of software and it works most of the time but that’s the problem - most is not good enough. If a driver mostly drives OK it doesn't make that driver safe. We need more common sense when we surrender our lives to a piece of software that is far from finished.

Source (in German)