You can have a similar argument for: if I'm drunk while driving that's my choice; if I don't cause any accidents, it should be none of anybody's business that I'm drunk.

You see, it doesn't work like that.

If Autopilot poses a significant risk to other road users, then an investigation is warranted.

Except there's no evidence that it does. I drive a Tesla. I've seen AP brake hard in circumstances where a distracted driver would have failed to notice. The system works. It does not work perfectly. But all it has to do to make that "if" clause false is work better than drivers do, and that's a very low bar.

Tesla themselves publish data on this, and cars get in fewer accidents with AP engaged. (So then the unskewers jump in and argue about how that's not apples and oranges, and we all end up in circles of nuance and no one changes their opinion. But it doesn't matter what opinions are because facts are all that matter here, and what facts exist say AP is safer than driving.)

I mean... there are two million of these cars on the street now, and all but a tiny handful of early Roadsters and S's have full featured autopilot. If there was a significant safety signal in all that data somewhere it would be very clear against the noise background now, and it isn't.

That's not true at all, and you know it. Consider the extremes: if autopilot got in zero accidents over these however many million miles of travel, you'd have to admit it was safe to use, right? If it got in 10x as many accidents as the median vehicle, we'd all agree it was a deathtrap. There's value in those numbers. Well, the truth is somewhere in between, it gets in 4x fewer accidents (I think) than the median car. That still sounds good to me.

You're just nitpicking. You're taking a genuine truth (that the variables aren't independent because "miles travelled with AP" aren't randomly sampled) and trying to use it to throw out the whole data set. Probably because you don't like what it says.

But you can't do that. The antidote to incomplete or confounded analysis is better analysis. And no one has that. And I argue that if there was a signal there that says what you want ("Tesla AP is unsafe") that it would be visible given the number of cars on the road. And it's not.

Stop nitpicking and get data, basically. The time for nitpicking is when you don't have data.

Meanwhile, I do have this one datum about how OTA updates caused a couple of accidents (see OP's story.) You cannot just dismiss it because it doesn't agree with a larger trend, if that larger trend is undetectable in the data.

It's a 9x reduction relative to median vehicle and 4x vs. non-AP Teslas! I mean, go read it: https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

You're just making stuff up. That's not a weak signal at all, and you know it. The argument you should be making is that it's a confounded signal. But that requires a level of sophistication that you aren't supplying (nor is anyone else). Which is exactly why I mentioned way upthread that these digressions were so tiresome.

There's literally no data in the world that will satisfy you, just admit it. Yours is an argument from priors only, to the extent that one anecdote ("A Tesla hit me!") is enough to outweigh a report like that.

This is false, or at very best misleading, considering that Tesla's Autopilot is responsible for more than 10 fatalities. Or in other words, Tesla's AP has killed more people than the entire rest of the domestic auto industry's smart cruise control features. Combined. (And Tesla's "safety" data conspicuously fails to mention any of these fatalities.)

And that doesn't even include all the times that AP ran into stationary emergency vehicles, or the many slow-moving accidents in parking lots, or the many near-misses that were avoided because the other driver was able to avoid the suicidal Tesla in time.

Who's being misleading here?

Unless you're now claiming that FSD is just a version of smart cruise control?

But if you mean vanilla cruise control, people die using that every day.

The fact that Tesla fans can't grasp the concept that Tesla is (a) not perfect and (b) deliberately endangering people's lives for profit is unfortunately not shocking any more, but it doesn't mean the rest of us have to put up with that schadenfreude.

> Except there's no evidence that it does.

It sounds like you two are talking past one another.

I don't believe op is presenting evidence that it does. Instead, they are saying that there is at least one antidote (TFA) and that someone (presumably a government agency) should investigate it.

Second: I think you're being too charitable. I think it's abundantly clear that grandparent believes that there is a "significant risk to other road users", and that this single data point confirms it. And clearly it doesn't.

People would be less upset with the drunk driver and more with the beer manufacture if they had been imbibing "alcohol free beer" which actually was not alcohol free.

Please don't propagate myths about "Tesla doesn't make it clear that you have to be in control of the vehicle."

My AP has many times disengaged because despite paying attention to the driving I wasn't putting enough torque on the wheel to convince AP that actually had my hands on the wheel.

Most other systems are far less clear, IMO.

You could fault their methods but NTSB is doing just that: waiting for a trend to emerge that would warrant such an investigation.

I'm not suggesting that Tesla's design is not the cause but if the driver were lying in order to shift blame, then NTSB would end up wasting their resources investigating it.

It does not, if you use it as Tesla tells you to use it - paying attention to the road at all times and with your hands on the wheel. If you don't do that, Autopilot is probably still better than distracted driving - over the years I sometimes would catch myself drifting off in my thoughts as I was driving to the point where I wasn't even sure how I drove my car for the past few seconds. I bet this happens to others, too, and often. Between that and even semi-autonomous Autopilot, Autopilot seems like a safer choice, and it'll only get better from here on out, though I don't think we're anywhere near real "FSD" where you'd be able to read a newspaper as the car drives itself.

There was a traffic accident. There are a variety of "automated" driving features in modern cars: Auto-park, cruise control, auto-pilot. Any one of these features could, under "less than ideal" circumstances, cause an accident that doesn't warrant contacting national authorities. Well before any regulatory body is going to do anything, private insurance would. They're going to investigate in an effort to determine fault and facts. Was autopilot to blame, or did the user spill a cup of coffee in the passenger's seat that caused them to take their eyes off the road, etc.

The idea that a national regulatory body is going to start looking into a single car crash seems great until you start thinking about the expense that would create for the taxpayers. Bureaucracy just isn't built to be agile, for better or worse.

Similarly, if you drive drunk and don't cause an accident, nobody will know. This doesn't make it legal, and nobody is trying to argue a point even tangentially similar to that. This is a straw man, and a rather obvious one. There is no national group that would ever investigate a drunk driving crash (assuming that was the only relevant information in the case). That's a local law enforcement issue.

TL;dr- The feds don't care about a sample size of 1 fender bender with no fatalities.

An automated driving system that can offer to function while incapacitated without the operater even being informed that there is any problem, is a different problem from an operator that neglected to press the brake pedal. The brake pedal itself and the rest of the braking system is absolutely required to meet a whole bunch of fitness standards.

1. In an industrial plant, equipment needs to be fitted with guards and other protective measures, even if it's arguable that sticking your hand into an exposed rotating mechanism, or grabbing a live electrical circuit, is your fault. If someone's hurt, and there's an investigation, the factory will be cited for not having the proper guards. From what I've read, this is one of the things that we now take for granted, but was hard won through labor activism resulting in a dramatic reduction in workplace deaths.

2. The European approach, where they assign "fault" for a crash, but at the same time investigate how the infrastructure can be redesigned to make the crash less likely.

Yes I would hope that a regulatory body investigates the OP's crash. At the same time, I've read some comments in HN that Tesla drivers hover their foot over the accelerator in case of "ghost" braking. Naturally this is anecdotal. Still, the driver could have mistakenly stepped on the wrong pedal.

Plaintiff can collect 40% of his damages from D1, etc. Some states will allow Plaintiff to collect 96% from D2, and give D2 the right to collect the other defendants' proportionate share from them.

Edit: Updated wording to make it less confusing. From system to whoever created the self driving tech.

> ... at some point in time along the technological advancement of self driving technology we'll have to stop blaming ourselves.

No we don't. We built it, so we're responsible for it and the consequences associated with its operation, regardless of how well it's engineered or how smart we think we are.

If you buy a chainsaw, you can trust it has certain safety features. If you buy a children’s toy, you can trust it doesn’t use lead paint, etc.

Those aren’t features you, as a consumer, have to explicitly test for before using them.

Similarly, I think society will demand that cars behave as cars, and not as projectiles. If a manufacturer claims a car has auto-pilot, but that auto-pilot has a tendency to rear end other cars, the manufacturer should carry at least some blame.

I think that should be true even if they explicitly mention that problem in the instruction manual. Certainly in the EU, whatever you buy, you can assume it is “fit for its purpose”.

To continue your analogy Chainsaw manufacturers include clear instructions, and directions to use safety PPE.. if a operator of the chainsaw fails to follow the instructions, or where the PPE and chops their leg off the manufacturer is not liable.. Hell even if they did follow the instructions and chop their leg off it would be unlikely the manufacturer would be liable.

Yes...

We already have examples of this with machinery that is automated. The Humans in charge of these automated machines are responsible for monitoring them, and have things like emergency shut downs, and various other safety protocols to shut them down when (not if When) they do unexpected things.

Machines are machines, they fuck up. The manufacturers are not held liable because the know these types of abnormal conditions exist they is why they have the safety protocols and human minders.

An example of this is the auto manufacturer i believe in TN or TX that did not train the operators properly on the safe way to operate, and lock out a machine, this failure to train lead to human injury. The manufacturer of the robot was not liable, the company that failed to train the human staff was.

Your example on the other hand is not relevant to the situation at hand, it misconstructs the problem. The machine required trained operators to operate the machine, driving a car requires a trained operator but that is where the similarities stop. You don't need any additional training to operate autopilot. If someone without a license sits behind the steering wheel they're at fault cause they're not supposed to drive the car in the first place, this would be an analogous situation. Yours, as pointed out, is not.

Let us not forget my original argument. Where I said that this is the current legal situation, I just think that this will change in the future if autonomous actions (driving or other behaviors) keep improving. I believe we have reached a point where it's not necessarily clear anymore who is in the wrong. Not in a legal sense, the law tends to run after the facts. More in a moral sense.

“Product liability is the area of law in which manufacturers, distributors, suppliers, retailers, and others who make products available to the public are held responsible for the injuries those products cause.”

A specific example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escola_v._Coca-Cola_Bottling_C.... : somebody uses a soda bottle as intended, gets hurt, and wins a case against the manufacturer of the bottle.

If you don’t follow instructions, that still can happen, but it will be harder to argue that a problem originated with the manufacturer.

Tesla's own marketing disagrees with this. Here's what Tesla says they mean when they say "Autopilot" and "Full Self-Driving":

> The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware...

I can speculate from people sleeping when driving Teslas that there are some drivers that interpret the marketing and documentation contradiction as "the laws forced Tesla to add this warnings in the documentation, Elon said autopilot is OK".

1 marketing message" Autopilot works and stupid politics forces us to release it with this tons of boilerplate warnings and having to pay attention"

2 the actual disclaimers the car will show you

this drivers chose to believe 1, this is obvious that marketing is undermining the reality, so IMO Elon and his marketing should be criminally responsible for undermining their own official message.

That's my point. The company that built the self driving technology should be held responsible. If you're not driving you're not responsible, that's how it works when somebody else is driving your car as well so why would it be any different if that somebody else is code? It seems like a good way to align the incentives to create a safe system. You could claim that at this point in time you still have to pay attention and take control when necessary, the issue I have with that argument is that we already have research showing us that the context switch results in a delay that's too long to be really useful in practice.

If your toaster blows up and kills someone a solid case against the maker of toasterb

But yeah, they shouldn’t call it that.

I drive a Tesla Model 3, but I have sufficient grey matter to understand that AutoPilot, in spite of its name, is SAE level 2 (see above reference). If the car is involved in an impact either something hit me, or I hit something - no blame attaches to the computer, because I’m still in charge. Given the current state of the art, I’m perfectly happy with that and bloody livid at anybody who is dumb enough to buy/lease and drive one of these amazing machines without being constantly and totally aware of their limitations.

Hard disagree.

This is the same as identity theft, where it becomes your responsibility instead of a failure on the part of the bank to protect your account, and the burden gets shifted entirely onto the consumer.

Relevant Michell and Webb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E

If Tesla sells a SAE Level 2 lane following / accident avoidance feature which should be able to stop and avoid rear end collisions, yet it causes rear end collisions, they must be liable for that failure. They can't just write words and shift all liability onto the consumer for the software failing to work properly. Nice try though.

And I don't care if the consumer technically agreed to that. If someone smacks into me with Autopilot enabled, I never consented to that technology and didn't give up my rights to sue Tesla.

Also, how is the bank supposed to protect your account if you give your login information away to a criminal? There are a non-negligible amount of cases where the consumer compromises their accounts themselves. The responsibility lies on both. The burden often isn’t placed on the consumer either. Merchants are often the ones that pay the highest price.

Why shouldn’t the driver be responsible for accidents in the car they’re driving at the current level of driver assist technology?

There's no reason that TACC shouldn't be able to handle the basic job of not running into the car in front of it in the vast majority of circumstances.

You bought a car, it promised functionality, it did not deliver and endangered another human/their property.

This is the fault of the manufacturer.

Here are some examples of non-autonomous driving cases where the manufacturer made a false promise: Volvo lawsuit: https://www.motorbiscuit.com/volvo-owners-seeking-class-acti...

Toyota recall after lawsuit https://www.industryweek.com/the-economy/article/21959153/to...

Chevy lawsuit: https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/consumer-pro...

It is my sincere hope that we can enjoy Elon's persona without just letting Tesla off the hook of being a car company. Or really, a company.

It's usually conveniently omitted from the story.

In the video there it says:

"THE PERSON IN THE SEAT IS ONLY THERE FOR LEGAL REASONS.

HE IS NOT DOING ANYTHING. THE CAR IS DRIVING ITSELF."

Total lie unless they are psycopaths and would be willing to run it with no one in the seat if not for legal reasons. In other words unless they were willing to murder if murder were legal--the video is from 2018 or maybe even earlier, where we know they were nowhere near ready for driverless.

On top of that it greatly mislead people about how soon it would be, and how far along they were. Buyers who they were charging like $9,000 to at the time.

The difference is that safety improvements to Autopilot can scale. Patch the software or upgrade the hardware to fix the root cause of this collision and future collisions can be avoided!

It is supposed to be super-self-driving... it has to count for something.