Not the same thing. Tesla insurance still doesn’t have limitless liability. But if they sell FSD they essentially have limitless liability. The jury can award $1B and they will have to pay.
This is a maximalist or
argumentum ad absurdum claim. If that were true, no AV could ever succeed. In fact, no corporate liability could ever be indemnified, in a wide variety of Industries on the argument that the Deep Pockets doctribe will always lead to unavoidable existential threats.
While it's certainly true that any Robotaxi or FSD vehicle provider will predictably endure outrageous damage claims, this is a variant of existing transportation-related tort law. (I'm no lawyer, I'm just stating the obvious.)
We all recognize that any such new technology invites all kinds of negative speculation, fear mongering, FUD and limit testing by eager lawyers. We also know that the USA may be the worst environment for runaway lawsuits. As corporations or more broadly as a society, everyone can just throw up their hands and say it's not worth it. But I don't think this is something Tesla (and many others) haven't thought about.
On the contrary, I think they've thought about it quite a lot - and that's why they started the insurance infrastructure. It was completely sensible to begin with insuring of Teslas to build the business infrastructure.
As I've pointed out before, the camera and telemetry capabilities of the AV are actually incredibly beneficial in Tesla's ability to defend themselves.
- Although no AV will be infallible, the rate of at-fault accidents resulting in serious injury or death will be far, far lower than for human driven vehicles.
- Tesla's ability to fend off false/mistaken claims of accident fault will be extremely good because of the aforementioned video and telemetry evidence.
- In order to take on the risk with predictable success, Tesla will have better data than anyone in history, as to the performance of its cars in a future unsupervised FSD scenario.
As mentioned above, outrageous jury awards are already a well-known problem. There's a whole regime of appeals and countersuits to rectify that. Usually when it doesn't work and does real damage to a company or industry, I think it's based on claims of criminally negligent behavior, usually involving cover-up of available data.
Just awarding $1B because a smooth-talking lawyer appealed emotianally to a sympathetic jury? Those happen, but don't usually survive the appeals process, and the less-sensational final resolution doesn't make the news.
