it's hard to prove that point, though. rolling out self driving may just make car usage go up and negate rate decreases by increasing overall usage

Not to mention tone-deaf. Maybe you shouldn't talk about life-saving technology when your technology anti-saved a life....

And that's ignoring the fact that they're using inferior technology. Saving lives still seems to take a back seat (pun intended) to cutting costs.

We can bet on a lot, but when you're betting on human lives, you might get hit with a massive lawsuit, right? Try to bet less.

Yeah, the problem is that the US has no consumer protections, and somehow this court is trying to make up for it, but it shouldn't be in such court cases where the driver was clearly not fit to drive a car.

Thank you. I seriously didn't understand what the field was.

The original comment is perpetuating the lie. Intentional or not. They rely on fundamentally flawed soundbites that are precisely crafted for propaganda not to be informative or truthful at all.

Right off the bat they're saying "in principle" which presumes the baseline lie that "full self driving" is achieved. Then they strengthen their argument by reinforcing the idea that it's functionally equivalent to humans (i.e. generalized intelligence). Then the cap it off with "no known flaw". Pure lies.

Of course they've hedged by implying it's opinion but strongly suggest it's the most correct one anyways.

I’m unsure of and how much has changed

This demonstrates exactly how effective the propaganda is. They set up scenarios where nobody honest will refute their bullshit with certainty. Even though we know there is no existing system is on par with human drivers. Sure they can massage data to say under certain conditions an automated driving system performed similarly by some metric or whatever. But that's fundamentally not what they are telling laymen audience. They're lying in order to lead the average person to believe they can trust their car to drive them as if they are a passenger and another human is behind the wheel. This not true. Period. There is no existing system that does this. There will not be in the foreseeable future.

The fact of the meta is that technological discussion is more about this kind of propaganda than technology itself. If it weren't the case then more people would be hearing about the actual technology and it's real limitations. Not all the spin-doctoring. That leads to uncertainty and confusion. Which leads to preventable deaths.

While Tesla said that McGee was solely responsible, as the driver of the car, McGee told the court that he thought Autopilot "would assist me should I have a failure or should I miss something, should I make a mistake," a perception that Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk has done much to foster with highly misleading statistics that paint an impression of a brand that is much safer than in reality.

Here’s the thing, Tesla’s marketing of autopilot was much different than the reality. Sure, the fine print might have said having your foot on the gas would shut down autopilot, but the marketing made autopilot sound much more powerful. This guy put his trust in how the vehicle was marketed, and somebody died as a result.

My car, for instance, does not have self driving, but it will still brake if it detects I am going to hit something. Even when my foot is on the gas. It is not unreasonable to think a car marketed the way Tesla was marketed would have similar features.

Lastly, Tesla’s valuation as a company was based on this same marketing, not the fine print. So not only did the marketing put people in danger, but Tesla profited massively from it. They should be held responsible for this.

The status quo is people driving poorly.

It's not people driving poorly, as much as it is horrible city planning, poor traffic design and, perhaps most importantly, not requiring people to be educated enough before receiving a driver's license.

This is an issue seen practically exclusively in underdeveloped countries. In Europe road accidents are incredibly rare. Nobody here even considers self-driving cars a solution to anything, because there's nothing to solve.

This is nothing but Tesla (et al.) selling a 'solution' to an artificially created problem, that will not solve anything and simply address the symptoms.

That is an issue.

i just realized that I didn't finish the thought. Once self driving is statistically safer we will ban human drivers. Some places it will be by law, Some the more subtile insurance costs, some by something else.

We need to figure out liability of course. I have ideas but nobody will listen so noebuint in writting.

There are other cars on the market that use technology that will literally override your input if they detect that there is a crash imminent. Even those cars do not claim to have autopilot and Tesla has not changed their branding or wording which is a lot of the problem here.

I can't say for sure that they are responsible or not in this case because I don't know what the person driving then assumed. But if they assumed that the "safety features" (in particular autopilot) would mitigate their recklessness and Tesla can't prove they knew about the override of such features, then I'm not sure the court is wrong in this case. The fact that they haven't changed their wording or branding of autopilot (particularly calling it that), is kind of damning here.

Autopilot maintains speed (edit), altitude (end of edit), and heading or flight path in planes. But the average person doesn't know or understand that. Tesla has been using the pop culture understanding of what autopilot is and that's a lot of the problem. Other cars have warning about what their "assisted driving" systems do, and those warnings pop up every time you engage them before you can set any settings etc. But those other car manufacturers also don't claim the car can drive itself.

What happens when you hit the gas while in cruise control? In all the cards I have driven, you go faster than the set speed and the car responds to your pedal movements. I guess we can debate if we call that stopped or just paused, but it is certainly not ignoring your acceleration.

No. Press the brake and it turns off. Press the accelerator in lots of cars and it will speed up but return to the cruise control set speed when you release the accelerator. And further, Tesla doesn't call it cruise control and the founder of Tesla has been pretty heavily misleading about what the system is and what it does. So.

Should be a class action lawsuit by Tesla owners and damages in tens of billions rather than millions tbh. I'm just saying that this particular case can't be seen as Tesla's fault by anyone being objective.

Because it still basically does what's they said. The only new advent for the autopilot system besides maintaining speed, heading, and altitude is the ability to use and set a GPS heading, and waypoints (for the purposes of this conversation). It will absolutely still fly into a mountain if not for other collision avoidance systems. Your average 737 or A320 is not going to spontaneously change course just because of the elevation of the ground below it changed. But you can program other systems in the plane to know to avoid a specific flight path because there is a known hazard. I want you to understand that we know a mountain is there. They don't move around much in short periods of time. Cars and pedestrians are another story entirely.

There's a reason we still have air traffic controllers and even then pilots and air traffic control aren't infallible and they have way more systems to make flying safe than the average car (yes even the average Tesla).

Well, yeah, you can call it “paused” if you want to. The cruise control definitely stays on though and resumes the set speed when you stop accelerating. It completely disengages when you brake though, so I’ve never thought of it as turning off when I accelerate, only when braking.

Yeah, sure.

You sound like one of those people who are the reason why we find the following warning on microwave ovens:

WARNING: DO NOT TRY TO DRY PETS IN THIS DEVICE.

And on plastic bags:

WARNING: DO NOT PLACE OVER HEAD.

We both know that this is not what it's for. And it (model S) has never been cleared ANYWHERE ON THIS GLOBE as an autonomous vehicle.

(Adaptive with lane assist and collision detection) Cruise control/autopilot on, foot on accelerator, no eyes on the road, no hands on the steering wheel. That's malice. There where visible, audible and even tactile warnings wich this guy ignored.

No current day vehicle (or something from 2019) has in it's manual that this is use as intended. As a matter of fact all warn you to not do that.

And I get that you hate Tesla/Musk, don't we all. But in this case only 1 person is responsible. The asshole driving it.

Nope. I'm correcting you because apparently most people don't even know how their cruise control works. But feel however you feel.

That's not how cruise control works and I have never seen cruise control marketed in a such a way that would make anyone believe it was smart enough to stop a car crash.

I'm pretty sure it was both.

Look, we've only known the effects of radium and similar chemical structures for about a hundred years or so. Give corporations a chance to catch up. /s