Building on what you said, I think that the sum is actually pretty significant if you think of it as being roughly $100 million per person, and then multiply by the number of people hurt by the supposed “Autopilot” who now have incentive to sue.
Comment on US judge upholds $243 million verdict against Tesla over fatal Autopilot crash
bitjunkie@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Unfortunately even an astronomical sum like this is still in “slap on the wrist” territory for a company that size. This is for a single incident, though, not class action. So it could be a valuable precedent in actually forcing them to act more responsibly for fear of more meaningful consequences.
totally_human_emdash_user@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
people hurt by the supposed “Autopilot”
I thought these cases were all regarding incidents with the FSD package and not autopilot? The autopilot (in Tesla) is just TACC and lane-assist, the “advanced” autonomous features that actually steer the car is all in FSD.
totally_human_emdash_user@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
Ah, I was not paying much attention to the distinction; my bad, then.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This case is about AP, but AP does steer the car. The car has TACC and Auto Steer, together it’s called Autopilot.
FSD is the one that can do lane changes, stop for stop lights/stop signs, and all the other necessary things like park and reverse.
ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
The “auto steer” is what is called lane assistance in other brands, it just keeps you centered in the lane and will do so for mild turns without disengaging. It doesn’t take turns or anything resembling actual steering beyond that, it goes straight and takes mild bends in the road like all others.
CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
It’s about 6% of net profit according to some websit.
hector@lemmy.today 1 day ago
This is significant if they actually pay it, it’s a drop in the bucket for their market capitalization, but as to the actual money they have it’s a very large amount, they don’t make that much money it’s all imaginary stock prices not earnings.
I’m sure they will appeal it until they get it cancelled.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 1 day ago
They have 44b in cash and 6.2b in free cash flow in 2025.
They make plenty of money.
They’ve paid off almost all their debt as well
hector@lemmy.today 1 day ago
That is quite a bit,
I just looked up their Price to Earnings Ratio to just see how much it’s changed and it’s 380. Typical P/E ratios are like 12/1. 12 price to 1 earning. It’s insanely overvalued still it defies logical explanation there is no way they ever make enough money to justify 1,540,000,000,000 market price, with 3,750,000,000 shares valued at 412 right now.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 1 day ago
You’re absolutely right that the earnings today doesn’t justify the stock price.
It’s all based off future assumptions that would need to come true like dominating the AV industry and humanoid robot industry.
There was actually a brief period in 2022 I think where the stock price was really high, but they were making more profit than other OEMs combined with a faction of the cars, and they were actually reaching what seemed like a reasonable PE ratio. Then he bought twitter, did the nazi stuff, did the Cybertruck instead of the 25k vehicle (which is now abandoned), and their vehicle growth started shrinking instead of growing.