On the one hand, if I get wasted and crash my car into a tree, insurers will generally cover that even though I was negligent. On the other hand, if I get cheaper home insurance by lying about having smoke detectors, and my house burns down, I might be in violation of the contract and not be covered.

So it seems like where this SHOULD end up is that insurers could charge more (or less as it gets better) for driving with these features. That said, I wouldn't fault an insurance company for not wanting to cover a system that says in all caps, as the linked article points out, "THIS IS ALPHA QUALITY SOFTWARE FOR RESEARCH PURPOSES ONLY." I'd possibly equate that warning to somebody who got into an accident after doing research on how well they could drive steering with their teeth, and it'd make me consider broadening the definition of "intentional" damage.

He makes this interesting observation that essentially all good drivers are alike; each bad driver is bad in his own way.

It's an interesting insight and great for self driving since the "good" drivers would be clustered while the "bad" drivers would essentially be noise.

As for the "who has liability" question it's simple: the driver does. Or at least it's intended to be simple in the absence of lawyers twisting the wording around. Regular, non self driving cars have basic driving assists. For example, cruise control will happily ram your car into the back of another one. Adaptive cruise still has a chance of doing that, plus it has the additional risk of causing an accident by randomly slamming on the brakes for no reason at all. For all these failure modes the liability is understood to lie with the driver: it is up to them to be alert enough to override the automation when it malfunctions. However, if you do a long distance drive with and without cruise control you'll quickly admit that it has value, even with all the imperfections. Same for Comma.

When you write software that can kill people, you don't get to roll your eyes at questions like "who is responsible when someone dies?".

These sorts of questions ARE engineering questions, and answering these questions with thought and care is important! Why? Because if the answer is "this is alpha quality and we might be liable" then you wait to deploy the feature. Which is why comma.ai is "ahead" of its competitors -- because they aren't doing real engineering. Thinking about the real-world context into which your system is being deployed is the thing that separates real engineering from R&D/hacking.

What you're describing is not engineering; it's R&D. Even comma.ai admits this. And, look, R&D is perfectly okay! Everyone else is also doing R&D on real roads! E.g., all of the major auto manufacturers are putting cars on real roads with full L5 (and safety driver backups where appropriate). In fact, the major auto manufacturers are all WAY ahead of comma.ai when it comes to R&D-quality systems! Compare Cruise or Argo or Uber ATG or Waymo to comma.ai.

But it's a terrible idea to ship R&D to paying customers when lives are on the line. If comma.ai wants to drive their system with their own safety drivers, that's fine.

This isn't even (just) a normative or ethical statement. It's simply a statement of fact, at least in the USA. For some reason Software never became a "real" engineering discipline. But automotive

Toyota was found legally responsible for its unintended acceleration bug from the mid 2000s when "the driver should pay attention 100% of the time" wasn't even something you would think to say because there were exactly zero driver assist features.

The driver is always responsible. This whole exercise feels like people trying to remove themselves from liability so that they can feel better about their absurd behavior.

Why can't we keep this simple? The driver is responsible.

When that didn’t work, I think they set out to develop a proof of concept that they could use to generate hype, then wait until an automaker wanted to buy their technology to catch up.

I get the impression they cursed future acquisition opportunities by refusing to even engage with safety regulators. They’re now selling their product in clever ways designed to shift all liability to the user.

In "clever ways" that completely fail to succeed in this goal, legally speaking. Product liability (law) is very expansive and generally covers every person in the chain from user to manufacturer.

Read through the Consumer Reports PDF [1]. It's abundantly clear that they have no idea how to properly evaluate adaptive cruise systems.

What this report tells you is exactly what you would expect from a Consumer Reports publication: the generic impression that a typical consumer will have after a few hours of use. This sort of superficial analysis is completely unrelated to anything approaching a real safety analysis.

[1] https://data.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/...

It's a bit like declaring your bike outperforms cars in crash safety because a magazine gives it 8/10 for handling and 9/10 for the visibility of your yellow jacket and your rear light having a "flash" mode.

They even have a specific callout for Comma:

> A determination was made to include the Comma Two Open Pilot system manufactured by > Comma.ai. Although Consumer Reports does not endorse after-market modifications to all > consumers, we feel that it is important to include the test results in this report to the industry. The > direct comparison of this system to the other OEM systems will hopefully provide insight on this > alternative approach and highlight the areas across the industry that have room for improvement.

It is at least SOMETHING. I haven't seen anything else even close to as formalized that looks across all the various systems out there. Do you have better ones to look at?

This is a deflection. I'm responding to a comment that stated:

>> as they state on their website, they scored #1 for best at that by Consumer Reports compared to the stock offerings

CR is irresponsible for issuing ranked scores while saying in the fine print that these scores aren't actually recommendations.

That they didn't foresee comma.ai using their recommendation in marketing only makes them that much more irresponsible.

Ah, it isn't marketed as a full autopilot. I'm not 100% confident that it should be used in the current state but I'm also not an auto regulator, so we shall see.

Many car models limit the amount (and at what rate) that the computer system can turn the wheel. The system is piggybacking off of this engineering for most of its 'safety'. There was people spoofing park assist on some models to get very strong control of the wheel but such discussion got banned on the official discord.

Which leads me to my big problem with Comma.ai: it's open source but not very open. Look at the code, go back several releases and watch the number of comments regress.

There's zero documentation, the wiki is a fucking joke and for some reason does not come up in a google search and is just missing critical information. No, I don't want to watch a 5 fucking minute video to find a 10 second clip with the information I need. Write that shit down.

Instead you ask a question and some asshole that is gunning for a job at comma posts a passive agressive screenshot of them using the discord search. It's almost like if you put effort into having information recorded instead of being a dick you wouldn't have to be a dick. That wouldn't be very fun or inflate egos much so it doesn't happen.

Their FAQ just says "ask your insurance company" lol