Potential life threatening maneuvers on the road are a feature of the self-learning Autopilot system???? Because without it the car will just ram itself into a wall???

>With that said, if that causes concern for the driver, the vehicle isn't for them.

What if it causes concern for the driver behind them, what then? My family will get a settlement after a Tesla kills me?

How the fuck are these cars legal anywhere???

Because product defects don't (in general) make the car illegal, they just incur strict liability for the manufacturer (and the chain of commerce, but in Tesla’s case that's moot except as to defects that originate upstream of them, since they sell direct to consumer) when they cause damages.

> How the fuck are these cars legal anywhere???

They're legal because Autopilot is driver assistance. The driver is still 100% responsible, just as they would be for cruise control.

Not if you slam on the brakes without cause on the highway.

“Any person driving a vehicle on a highway shall drive the same at a careful and prudent speed not greater than nor less than is reasonable and proper, having due regard to the traffic, surface and width of the highway and any other conditions then existing, and no person shall drive any vehicle upon a highway at a speed greater than will permit the driver to bring it to a stop within the assured clear distance ahead.”

Maybe if you have a dash cam. Maybe if you can prove there was nothing in front of the person in front of you. Lot of maybes.

That's a bit of a sideshow. Tesla needs to worry about the civil liability involved in making a car that stops suddenly in the middle of the road. For example, "The driver is still 100% responsible, just as they would be for cruise control" is absolutely not going to impress anyone as a defense if there is enough property damage or personal injury involving such a feature to justify a class action.

Class action vs. direct action is immaterial; Tesla can't disclaim it's liability for manufacturing g defects even if it tried, and stating that the driver remains responsible for following traffic laws isn't even superficially a disclaimer of product defect liability anyway.

Product defect liability is strict liability for damages produced, and there's a fairly high bar for excluding liability due to intervening causes which would not generally apply to the simple negligence of a driver (either of a Tesla or the other involved vehicle) which contributed to a collision where the defective operation of an assist system was also a contributing cause.

Anyone can sue anyone in the US. Take it up with their general counsel.

If your brakes don't work your car is illegal on the road (at least here in Europe). But apparently if its a software bug in the brakes then its okay to drive it around...

Even when self-driving cars become popular, people will still be injured and die in them. And it won't be just a subset of the people who would have died without such cars. It will almost certainly be a different, randomly selected group of people. If it's your time to go, does it matter to you whether you died because a texting teenager slammed into your stopped car? Or because an edge case triggered in a car's software? The former case is just stupid. The latter case is something society can learn from and prevent from ever happening again.

If you are in favor of more people dying in "normal" accidents, then by all means, please continue expressing your outrage.

The cost of progress in this area is computers making mistakes instead of people making them.

There is no way that Autopilot is worse than human drivers: https://i.imgur.com/au8A1o3.gifv

I'm starting to understand why all the other self-drive companies use active sensors like lidar. You need that to compensate for the fact that the AI actually driving the car is less intelligent than a honeybee.

A self-drive "AI" is dumb. It's just a glorified expert system with a lot of pattern recognition and other stuff bolted on. But the performance of dumb things can sometimes be improved by giving them more information. Self-driving cars need super-human senses.

Lidar is doubly special because its an active sensing system. If the car hits an undecidable edge case it can probe it to see if it's physical or a lighting artifact. It needs to be able to do this because it has no higher order conceptual model of the world to reference. It doesn't "know" what an overpass or the sun "are."

Edit: This principle is also why "big data" has helped revive "AI." We need big data because our AI isn't very I. Biological intelligences do incredible things with very small amounts of data because they have more I. What's so impressive about biology is what it can do with small data.

Every roboticist since the DARPA Grand Challenge knew this, as every team that finished had a Velodyne LIDAR. It was THE piece of tech that made that race possible. So for everyone who learned that lesson, to then see Telsas out on public roads with a feature called "autopilot" that did not have any LIDAR sensor attached to it... well... Let's just say we've been saying "I told you so" since then.

IMHO doing without precise active sensing would require a breakthrough in AI that hasn't happened yet.

On the plus side the fact that Tesla's autopilot is able to work as well as it does without lidar might indicte that with a lidar system it might be the best autopilot on the market. Who knows.

A human driver who did that during a driver's license test would be failed.

You must own a lot of Tesla shares to make such a ridiculous statement.

I do, but I also entrust my wife and kids in a Model S. I specifically bought the Model S (a used 75D) for them due to its safety record. That's worth far more to me than any Tesla shares. With that said, my wife is aware under what conditions it is safe to engage Autopilot, and is also aware that she is still the responsible party if an accident happens when it's engaged. She doesn't use her phone, she doesn't not pay attention, she is babysitting the vehicle while at speed and still has final authority.

> to make such a ridiculous statement.

You think the statement is ridiculous. 40,000 people a year die in the US driving due to human decisions. Several friends I attended high school with were killed in car accidents. Loved ones have been killed in car accidents. I don't think my statement is ridiculous in that context. These sorts of efforts are necessary to move the needle on transportation safety. Perfectly happy with my TSLA shares going to zero in the process, as long as progress is made.

"The vehicle could do X while under your control. If you are not comfortable with X occurring while under your control, do not buy the vehicle (or buy the vehicle, but do not purchase Autopilot). The vehicle feature that could cause this is still permitted by regulators to be functional. You are solely responsible for the actions of the vehicle while operating it."

Don’t tailgate.

More importantly for discussion of an automated system shadow braking, however, fault of drivers based on negligence (or more serious mental states, like recklessness) is a separate concept from fault of manufacturers for product defects (which is based on strict liability, not negligence, and therefore bars to liability based on negligence of the injured party due to contributory or modified comparative negligence theories would not generally apply; liability might be barred on a theory of superseding intervening cause, but that would require the intervening cause to be unforseeable—too close freeway following is not so rare as to be an unforseeable intervening cause and thus would not usually limit recovery on a strict liability product defect claim.)

[0] see, e.g., https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/is-fault-automatic-r...