Naturally if my estate sues you personally, your defense would be that you didn't know the product was dangerous. Perhaps if the whistleblower's leak is widely publicized, that would weaken your defense.
Certainly the leak should weaken the maker's ability to claim they didn't know.
(IAAL, but this is greatly simplified -- consult a licensed attorney.)
You cannot sue Mercedes if someone decides to use a car they manufactured to ram into people on the sidewalk. Well, Maybe you can sue, but you can absolutely not win.
On the same line of logic, you absolutely can not sue Walmart if your relative gets stabbed by a knife they sold, Had manufactured, or similar.
And then along the same line of logic, you cannot sue a gun manufacturer/dealer if someone decides to use a gun they sold/manufactured to harm someone.
Guns dont kill, people kill.
IF however a gun manufacturer ran advertising suggesting people buy their guns to shoot up farmers markets, schools etc. Or if gun sellers ran advertising with subliminal messages urging people to whack their neighbor, well then you absolutely CAN sue them, and would probably have a good case.
More similarly to this case here, IF a gun manufacturer made a gun that is obviously defective, leading to injury/death, and you had a leaker come and show evidence they knew about it, and didnt care, well then you would probably have a good case aswell.
Yeah, I see someone brainwashed and agendaed here and is not me. BTW if that phrase had any hint of truth to it people could just buy nuclear weapons as long as they can afford it, but no, we know that is too much power to be handed to the capriciousness of a single random person, but they pretend it's any different with handguns; manufacturers and everyone else involved know the next victim will be some kid they don't know and therefore don't care about and doesn't concern them at all, while nuclear warfare is much ore likely to affect them directly so it cannot be abstracted away as a statistic.
yes, I have an agenda, its called freedom and anti-violence. You dictating I cannot have a gun is violence against me. Same as if I tried to dictate you cannot have a car
but yes, it is violence. owning another human being would be too, and you for sure are also aware that it is not even comparable to own a piece of metal/plastic/wood and a human being.
Gun control isn't perfect, but it does a pretty good job in most of the world. You can't let perfection be the enemy of improvement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRdUjrOnKdw
and human drivers do not set an infinitely high bar.
If you kill the R&D goose or smother it in overregulation, more people will die.
Feels to me like amateurs (backed by a small army) confidently building bridges and daring the community to try and stop them. (Except Tesla's army are fan boys, lobbyists, and lawyers.) So basically speed running a millennium of civil engineering, except ignoring the more expensive safety controls; like LIDAR.
If you google FSD fail compilation, you'll get a FSD fail compilation. You can do the same for humans.
Now if FSD proponents want to stop people from having doubts, they need to run several experiments in very diverse settings (as diverse as real world driving). In the absence of sufficient evidence, a skeptic is completely justified.
There's so much bias at every step of the process of looking up youtube videos that it lends essentially no credibility to any claim in any direction on this matter
If? FSD drives a million miles a day. There are a few.
Tesla spends $0 on advertising with Google.
Please continue this line of thought -
When I see a human fail video, where that person is an idiot, or drunk I conclude they shouldn't be driving. And usually their legal right to drive is taken away.
When I see FSD driving like a drunk idiot, I also conclude FSD shouldn't be driving. And their right to drive shouls also be taken away.
Lets treat them the same.
AP/EAP will run red lights and can't merge lanes on a freeway. FSD will stop for lights/stop signs, but that's about it. FSD Beta is what Tesla is typically known for and what many YouTube videos are showing. FSD Beta will stop at red lights and merge into freeways. Most people use FSD interchangeably, but they are not the same thing.
Your examples are bad. People do both of those things all the time.
survivorship_bias_airplane.jpg
Access to most of the latest versions of FSD were doled out on the basis of privilege. What do you think happened to people who post negative "reviews"?
https://electrek.co/2022/11/24/tesla-full-self-driving-beta-...
What I don't do is assume an outcome and then go find supporting evidence to validate it. It's really easy to lie to yourself that way, and I've been trying to do it less.
Reading comprehension at 0%.
I have big doubts regarding this claim. I could not find any source that is not Tesla.
Given that TFA is about Tesla deceiving and hiding information from customers, do you have any source that isn't Tesla or Musk?
Genuine question: what evidence is there of this?
Are Teslas measurably less safe than other cars? I.e. is the accident probability per km driven on a Tesla higher than on another car? I haven't seen any data suggesting that, but I'm happy to be corrected.
If a car kills someone (e.g. it explodes, or burns down, or brakes fail) but the manufacturer took all legally required precautions & followed all the rules & regulations, then they're not legally on the hook. It was "an accident".
Yes, we noticed that corporation are never held accountable for their actions.
After all, personal responsebility is only for little people.
If a human driver fail to brake somehow (like they have a bad reflex and push the wrong pedal), they might have followed all the rules and regulations, it might be "an accident", but they will still be liable for dammages they cause.
I'm not sure why it should be any different for a software bug in the autopilot for example.
I mean, what you say is sorta specious. Of course that's true, it's always true. The interesting question is "are the cars dangerous?". And the answer seems to be a pretty emphatic no, at this point. So instead everyone wants to argue about abstractions ("they're still liable") or absolutisms ("no failure is acceptable").
And that seems increasingly counterproductive, and frankly to have more to do with the somewhat questionable mental stability of the CEO than to the behavior of the actual products.
All of the elements of the Tesla business model like no repairs, no dealers, etc are all about maintaining that control.
Also Full Self Driving is extremely deceptive name for feature that does not do that
Is this even a real question? The product acts on it's volition! Ofcourse it's different.
Imagine you buy a crate of crate of C4 - well, its super dangerous, but it does not have a mind of it's own. Untill you touch it, it stays put. So long as you store it properly, it doesnt go off. If you kill someone with it, you go to jail.
But with a car, it can suddenly decide to kill you because of bad code. It could allow someone else to take control and kill you. It could kill someome else and make it look like you committed murder.
The fact that it has a computer and follows someone else's orders is a foundamental difference.
The question is whether or not the murder robots are a real thing or just a meme. And I think we all know the answer. Look, the cars are safe. Another story on the front page today noted that the Model Y is currently the best selling car on the market. If they were dangerous in any measurable way, we'd know. They aren't. They just aren't. But sure: if they do decide to kill their overlords, it's 100% on Tesla.
Insurance covers risk. More cost exposure, more cost gets passed on to the customer
Lets assume the ridiculous best case scenario: Tesla cars are 2x as safe as other cars.
If replacement parts for a Tesla car cost 2x the amount of regular cars, there is practically no difference in cost. It will still cost more to repair that Tesla comparatively to other vehicles per accident.
Remember, insurance also calculates the driver's individual risk level.
Combine that with reckless Tesla owners letting the car just drive for them while asleep at the wheel. Tesla cars still have a high risk overall.
Why do you think that? If we used statistics to guide criminal justice policy we’d be in big trouble
Uh... we do use statistics to guide criminal justice policy? Not sure I understand what you're saying. How do you think they decide where to police and what to prosecute? How they decide on legislative penalties? It's true that this process isn't necessarily 100% data based, and in a bunch of ways ends up very unfair, but it's absolutely driven by a mostly-sincere attempt to get the most social good out of our limited enforcement and regulatory budgets.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with statistics, you just need to maintain an appropriate threshold for where you draw the statistical line.
Additionally, there's no data because Tesla releases nothing except heavily doctored numbers meant to make them look good. (To Tesla, a crash means airbag deployed. Sorry, random person that got ran over and killed, but you're out of Tesla's statistics)
You can count on Tesla for one thing, and that is to lie.
girlboss...?
As in Tesla's official policy is to gaslight you and gatekeep the information.
Source: I'm a zoomer who was active on TikTok during the pandemic :P
It seems like you're holding Tesla to a higher standard than any other automaker. Which other automakers reveal similar information willingly? Many (or likely most) other automakers have made deceptive and/or dangerous products, in just about every manner imaginable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Fuel_system_fires,_...
https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/22/12007862/fca-jeep-grand-c...
Look forward to a criminal fraud investigation, billions in fines, Musk resigning etc.
Agreed that it seems like everyone at least looked suspicious.
"But, mom! Everyone is doing it!" cried the 12-year-old.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
There was a period in the early-mid 2000s where their diesels, along with Mercedes, got pushed out of California and CARB-compliant states. The opinion among diesel enthusiasts was that this was intentional on the part of CARB not just over NOx concerns, but also to help the market for hybrids grow. Otherwise, given the TDI's at-the-time superior highway mileage and the then-prevailing diesel prices, the VW diesel would have presented as the superior option to the Prius for a lot of people.
During this period, there was still a lot of pent-up demand for the VW and Mercedes diesels in California. Any car coming from out of state with at least 8,500 miles on the odometer was considered a "used car" and could be registered no matter the powerplant, so there was quite a cottage industry of putting that much mileage on brand-new out-of-state diesels and then turning them around on LA or SF Craigslist. The market here was primed to buy VW, but VW cheated to get in a position to sell new "CARB-compliant" diesels again. I'm not surprised that the prosecutors went after them disproportionately.
Example making can be rather distasteful, but it can also be an effective deterrent preventing similar things happening again.
because it sure reads like this is exactly what your view.
it doesn't matter if there's a double standard, it's bad behavior no matter what the rules are for everyone else. and if there is a double standard then that is something else that needs addressing. a double standard does not diminish the severity of these documents.
You read the whole 100GB already? I'm impressed with your speed-reading skills!
Other automakers don't go and scream around in their advertising (or in the antics of their founder) to the degree Tesla does.
Not perfect, and has serious bugs but it’s been used by millions for decades. Even software that costs billions has zero days.
We could be in a world where everyone pays RSA and still have massive vulnerabilities.
We could be so lucky if all software ra exactly like OpenSSL.
The trouble with cars on roads is that you're putting others lives in danger, not just yours. I think we should require a huge and lengthy validation process for true autonomous level 5 self driving. So autonomous the car doesn't need a driver at all. It seems possible for an open source self driving system to go through this validation for one particular build of the system. (though not economically feasible). But the moment I start modifying my own system (say, increasing `DRIVING_AGGRESSION` by 10 percent), it's no longer the same system that was verified as safe.
But even if personal modification is out of the question, the safety verification process needs to be so thorough and costly it seems difficult for anyone but a major for-profit company to go through it.
every single thing you use has a dependency chain so deep it will make you cry
do you trust the company making the drum on your washing machine? it could kill you. how about the company making the CNC that makes the drum? how about the security of the people making the laptops that made the cad software that made the CNC machine that made the drum for your washing machine, and so on?
how about the bridge you walk on?
We live in a society with deep dependency chains on technology we can't possibly understand as individuals, that much is true
But all of those technologies are subject to independent auditing and regulation to make up for that lack of verifiability on an individual level. It is technologically feasible to apply that kind of standard to computer technologies, and in fact I would argue that it's much easier than it is for a lot of other kinds of technology we rely on. That our willingness at a political level to do so is lacking is a corruption issue, not a feasibility one.
I don't understand why we need to put so much technology in a vehicle. Honestly, it seems to me that is absolutely unnecessary tech, ridiculous.
I'd like to have a vehicle like the ones 15 or 20 years ago but electric: analog indicators, physical buttons, etc. And a car that you can actually REPAIR by yourself without having to be an electronic engineer or something alike.
There was a post about someone that owned a Tesla car and managed to repair it (if I recall it correctly) for under 500 bucks when Tesla was trying to charge above 10000 USD.
All this high-tech also means that we're doomed and at the mercy of car companies for any kind of maintenance. It seems that we're heading to the same dead end as with mobile phone industry: zero control over them.
If that's the bright future that awaits us, I'll take public transport as much as I can.
that 1. removes an ICE off the road 2. saves on new mfr costs and 3. is a worthy hacker endeavour and/or 4. supports a local business
of course if you simply hate cars and want everyone to ride the train or bikes you'll find a million reasons to not do this. good luck with that.
Of course you can say "here are 4 pros - if you say anything bad you want the world to suffer from cars" but you know that this is not how we can get to a solution.
Case in point:
At a time where Manhattan commercial real estate is about to implode and traffic is at a nadir, there’s a major push to kill driving in NYC to pay for overpriced mass transit. Instead of investing in electric vehicle infrastructure, we’re investing in destruction of lots of businesses (like nationally prominent hospitals).
Maybe it should implode? The prices for real estate are so high, you have to sell drugs on the side to pay rents. Many businesses just aren't viable becaus of it.
Growth in real estate is not real economic growth, it's more of tumour.
No, because ~nobody would buy them.
> I don't understand why we need to put so much technology in a vehicle.
Because 99% of people want it. Not everyone wants everything, buy each group of people wants some features and the end result is that you have to stuff your car full of tech to be competitive in the modern car market.
And this isn't an EV thing. The tech is going into all the ICE vehicles too. Tesla is the exception, they put huge screens into cars well before everyone else and they happen to be an EV company. But normal manufacturers are mostly putting similar tech in their ICEs and EVs.
Amazing tech. It usually warns me against collisions after I'm done avoiding them. 90% of the time it doesn't notice.
Cars aren't phones, and maybe a $15k car would sell well in this economy, but with way higher margins on a slightly better car at $40k, why would any automaker willingly give up a big pile of profit?
This is what you get when you have incompetents doing statistics.
At this point nobody on the planet can fit a phone in their hands, but they keep getting larger.
There aren't even any base-level trims available from most of the big manufacturers to offer to the "99% of people." Less than two months ago I was looking to see if I could find a manual Nissan Versa 2023 for my uncle. It's basically the paper-cup-and-string-phone tech equivalent for a car. It wasn't available within 300 miles of me, and pre-orders were above MSRP.
If an Eastern European country could export 5,000,000 two-stroke wooden cars to the U.S. right now they would probably dominate the auto industry in less than a month.
(Let alone the fancy stuff like electronic stability control, blind spot warning, autonomous emergency braking, autodipping headlights, lane keeping, dynamic cruise control, auto-parking, or attention monitoring? Those'd be nice too, probably.)
Things like heated steering wheels, and heated seats with rise and fall motors and motorised windows and mirrors, yeah, OK, I could do without those - but lots of people would disagree.
But "tons of houses and not a shop or anything else in sight" is of course a problem on its own. Thankfully not really in my country, there is usually some local shops nearby everywhere
The problem is they charge $300 for a maps update.
For that $300 I can just pay for a third party maps app that has the same features.
If the argument for connecting phones to cars is navigation I don't feel it is the strongest one.
I'd love to, the problem is it would get some pitifully low NCAP rating (because lack of active securities would bring the score down and I remember it is && deal, so car can have excellent crash safety yet still get low stars coz of lack of the electronic toys), and manufacturers want to sell as much gadgets as possible, because every few bucks of extra electronics is every few dozen bucks they can charge customer for.
The other problem I think is that the "fancy annoying electronics" are probably not that big part of the price of the car. Add chassis, battery, heating/cooling system for the car and all the mechanics and you already arrived at most of the car's production price.
Like, even if you add $500 of the compute (amounting to mid-high range GPU) and $500 on ruggedizing it for car work... extra $1000 worth in electronics isn't all that much of car price.
I for one am keeping my 8th gen Civic Type-R for as long as possible, got ABS, airbags, even some traction control but none of the annoyances of modern cars. All I want from new car is android auto...
And might have A/C controls built into infotainment...
On the other hand, I think the whole concept of cars is the actual problem, especially heavier cars. The tire dust alone is enough to think about weening ourselves off the project. Then there is strip mining the earth for cobalt and all the other nasty shit in the devices, it's pretty bad.
Where I live e-bikes are really taking off, to me e-bikes and public transport seem like the ultimate way to go. It even looks futuristic. A little bit of exercise and movement, combined with fully autonomous, small electric trains would be the best of all worlds.
By "public transport" you mean shared ebikes? I don't think this can be a mainstream public transport solution if we want to move forward. Ebikes are unsafe, for starters. I expect a lot worse security issues than what's being reported with Teslas...
Ebikes won't be mainstream in a typical American city though, the distances between home, goods and services and work are usually too great and cars are basically baked into the culture. Better mass transit and bikes for those living in denser cities, is likely America's only good option.
I don't think e-bikes are unsafe though, their lack of safety is dominantly because of cars, and infrastructure not being set up for cycling.
According to WSDOT, there were 2 bicycle-related fatalities in Washington state in all of 2023, vs. 218 automobile-related fatalities. So a 100x difference. The data is there if you care to look for it.
The number of bike trips will not increase by 100x only, certainly by orders of magnitude more than that.
Now multiply the 2 fatalities considering 10,000x or even more bike trips...
Sources:
https://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/transport/trafikulykke...
I find it very dubious to assume that cars drive the same amount of kilometers as bikes in the Netherlands...
I ride my bike just shy of 40kms per commute, the same amount I would drive.
Compare that painful inconvenience to a car accident and it's just silly to call an e-bike dangerous.
I have been in 4 car accidents, and am lucky to be here. You step out from a totalled car, and see the carnage, distress and mess that everyone is now subject to. Traffic has to be redirected, cops show up to take down details of those still alive, EMTs try to find the ways you've been contorted, firemen have to disable the vehicle and clear any fuel and fire risk, the tow trucks scrape the husks of twisted metal off the street so people can use the road again. It's a whole ordeal, and regularly fatal.
Although there are exceptions, usually bike accidents are only fatal when a car was involved. Cars are not safe and never have been, we just accept the risk for the convenience.
> I don't think this can be a mainstream public transport solution if we want to move forward.
The cities of Copenhagen and Amsterdam beg to differ. Bicycles are first-class citizens there in terms of transport.
> Ebikes are unsafe, for starters.
Do you have any stats on that?
Bike have half the number of tires but remember that they carry 1/5 the number of people. For one person, fine, but families? Good luck selling it... They're also problematic when it rains or snows. Or when the sun is hot.
Concrete example: this week I had to drive some people between San Jose and Hollywood. Google maps says that's 5:40 hours over 340 miles. I looked at renting a model 3 for the trip but it simply could not justify itself when compared to the minivan I ultimately rented with 500+ miles range. Not only was I not forced to stop in BFE for 20-40 minutes, I didn't have to stop at all. Arrived with plenty of gas to get to any station in LA I might want (cheapest). And I wasn't even pressed for time, but if I'm slapping an extra half hour onto the trip I'd rather spend it (and actually did) on taking the more scenic US101 route for ~400 miles instead.
It takes me at least 3 minutes one way to get to a gas station, then another few minutes to fill up.
They aren't, as a matter of fact you buy yourself a whole lot of ICE interior opulence with the price you'd pay for a spartan EV.
The time saved up over the year of not having to go to a gas station every other week and just plugging in at home will dwarf the extra charging time on the very rare road trips (where I'd have to stop and let the kids have some fresh air anyway)
Say I have to go round trip to LA every 6 months. Adding up the 2 charging stops that's an hour:20 or so of downtime charging.
With a gas car, 5 minutes at a gas station every 2 weeks works out to only one hour every 6 months.
So your assertion, confidently presented, does not carry water.
Touchscreens on cars need to die out, preferably quickly.
I have so many things where I just want the old non-electric style back.
If Aptera manages to scale up production, it looks like they'll deliver that part at least. They're promising to make all the manuals and parts available to anyone.
"girlboss" ? Care to elaborate ? I don't exactly know what you mean here
> For me, cars cross a very key danger threshold, which I express like this: "I am trusting my life to this device by using it. I must I trust that it will not malfunction".
Do you feel the same way about the Covid vaccines?
“FDA Says It Now Needs 75 Years to Fully Release Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Data“ https://www.allsides.com/news/2021-12-08-1553/fda-says-it-no...
The official policy to deprive customers and victims of information as much as possible is shocking from the standpoint of being flagrantly, cynically customer-hostile to the point of probable illegality, but it's right out of both Musk's normal playbook and that of his erstwhile colleagues at e.g. Paypal
For me, cars cross a very key danger threshold, which I express like this: "I am trusting my life to this device by using it. I must trust that it will not malfunction". We are in an era where cars have computer overrides, so that standard needs to be applied to the security and reliability of the computer inside. We are also in an era where computers sold by corporate robber-barons (IE most major corporations) will routinely not merely malfunction, but explicitly, intentionally betray the interests of their end-users for increasingly marginal gains for the company
Even if you trust the company that sold your car's computer, do you trust their security? All their employees? When we are putting computers in devices, like cars, where them operating as expected is life-or-death, those computers need to be auditable by independent experts and controllable by the end-user. To be clear, that unambiguously refers to the person or persons trusting - with their lives - that car operating safely and responding to their commands. We need to mandate open-source, user-owned computers in devices this dangerous, period.