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Tesla must pay portion of $329M damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

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Re: Tesla must pay portion of $329M damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

#101

Post by metabagel »

knodi123 wrote: post #92
metabagel wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much is your life worth?

to me? an infinite amount! So trying to measure it in dollar terms is already a pointless exercise. If you want to see the hole in this argument, try looking at it from the other side- How can you arrive at the conclusion that a life is worth only $329M? Why so low? Why not a billion, or a trillion? If you have to come up with an objective and dispassionate standard, then I doubt you'd find one where the number it ge…

> So trying to measure it in dollar terms is already a pointless exercise.

That strikes me as an argument for a judgement of zero dollars, which is the exact opposite of the reality that life is worth infinitely more than money.

Re: Tesla must pay portion of $329M damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

#102

Post by JumpCrisscross »

dontlaugh wrote: post #61
ratelimitsteve wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I hope we haven't internalized the idea that corporations should be treated the same as people. Only when it comes to rights. When it comes to responsibilities the corporations stop being people and go back to being amorphous, abstract things that are impossible to punish.

Would be nice to see executions of corporations as punishment.

> Would be nice to see executions of corporations as punishment

Fines. Massive fines.

"Corporate death penalty" is a genius invention of corporate lawyers to distract from the punitive effect of massive fines.

Fines and license revocable are precedented. They take real money from the corporation and its owners. Corporate death penalties are a legal morass that doesn’t actually punish shareholders, it just cancels a legal entity. If I own an LLC and have a choice between a fine and the LLC being dissolved, I’d almost always opt for the latter.

But fines are boring. Corporate death penalty sounds exciting. The anti-corporate folks tend to run with it like catnip, thus dissolving the coalition for holding large companies accountable. (Which, again, a corporate "execution" doesn't do. Nullifying my LLC doesn't actually hurt me, it just creates a little bit of work for my lawyer, and frankly, getting out of a fuckup by poofing the LLC without touching the udnerlying assets is sort of the selling point of incorporation.)

Re: Tesla must pay portion of $329M damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

#103

Post by dzhiurgis »

guywithahat wrote: post #4

> The company must pay $329 million in damages to victims and survivor, including compensatory and punitive damages. > A Tesla owner named George McGee was driving his Model S electric sedan while using the company’s Enhanced Autopilot, a partially automated driving system. > While driving, McGee dropped his mobile phone that he was using and scrambled to pick it up. He said during the trial that he believed Enhanced…

Let's fine Apple too, since they allow smartphones to be using while driving.

Re: Tesla must pay portion of $329M damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

#104

Post by jayess »

metabagel wrote: post #43
jayess wrote: post #40

Good lord, $129 million in compensatory damages is absurd. One thing you notice when visiting Florida is that every other billboard says "In a wreck? Get a check! Call Lawyer Ambulance Chaser Jones!!"

How much is your life worth?

Probably a few million, tops.

Re: Tesla must pay portion of $329M damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

#105

Post by LorenPechtel »

al_borland wrote: post #79

If I were running a car company, I may decide to stop development on assistive features and remove any that exist from future models. The way people are using them, and the courts are punishing the companies for adding these safety features, is it worth it to them? Not having them would also bring down the base price on vehicles, which seems to be the primary complaint from people right now.

It's not assistive features in general that are the problem. It's that level 3 self-drive (which is what Tesla purports to have) should not be permitted to exist.

Things which simply help the driver, fine. Lane assist, adaptive cruise control and other such things that remove some of the workload but still leave the driver with the full responsibility of control. That's level 2.

Level 3 can generally run the car but is not capable of dealing with everything it might encounter. That's where you get danger--this guy thought he could pick up his dropped phone, his car didn't even manage to stay in it's lane. And the jury quite correctly said that's totally unacceptable.

The next step above level 2 should be skipping to level 4--a car that is capable of making a safe choice in all circumstances. That's Waymo, not Tesla. A Waymo will refuse to leave the area with the sufficiently detailed mapping it needs. A Waymo might encounter something on the road that it can't figure out--if that happens it will stop and wait for human help. Waymos can ask their control center for guidance (the remote operators do not actually drive, they tell the car what to do about what it doesn't understand) and can turn control over to a local first responder.

Re: Tesla must pay portion of $329M damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

#106

Post by jayess »

BonoboIO wrote: post #80

Tesla tried to hide evidence … the jury probably did not like to be lied to by Tesla. F** around and find out > The case also included startling charges by lawyers for the family of the deceased, 22-year-old, Naibel Benavides Leon, and for her injured boyfriend, Dillon Angulo. They claimed Tesla either hid or lost key evidence, including data and video recorded seconds before the accident. > Tesla has previously face…

"Schreiber acknowledged that the driver, George McGee, was negligent when he blew through flashing lights, a stop sign and a T-intersection at 62 miles an hour before slamming into a Chevrolet Tahoe that the couple had parked to get a look at the stars."

Re: Tesla must pay portion of $329M damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

#107

Post by lotsofpulp »

aaomidi wrote: post #25
ajross wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As gets pointed out ad nauseum, the very first "cruise control" product in cars was in fact called "Auto-Pilot". Also real "autopilot" systems in aircraft (where the term of art comes from!) aren't remotely supervision-free. This is a fake argument (post hoc rationalization): It invents a meaning to a phrase that seems reasonable but that has never been rigorously applied ever, and demands that one speaker, and only…

That’s why we have a jury. Autopilot quite literally means automatic pilot. Not “okay well maybe sometimes it’s automatic”. This is why a jury is made up of the average person. The technical details of the language simply does not matter.

Autopilot is used when referring to a plane (until Tesla started using it as a name for their cruise control that can steer and keep distance).

In the context of a plane, autopilot always meant automatic piloting at altitude, and everyone knew it was the human pilots that were taking off and landing the plane.

Re: Tesla must pay portion of $329M damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

#108

Post by andsoitis »

comte7092 wrote: post #64

A lot of discussion in this thread about the technical meaning of “autopilot” and its capabilities vs FSD. This is really missing the point. Tesla could have called it “unicorn mode” and the result would still be the same. The true issue at hand is that Elon Musk has been banding about telling people that their cars are going to drive themselves completely for over a decade now and overstating teslas capabilities in…

> it doesn’t matter because technically the fine print says otherwise.

Every time you engage the system it tells you to pay attention. It also has sensors to detect when you don’t and forces you. If you have more than N violations in a trip, the system is unavailable for the remainder of your trip.

I don’t know how much clearer it could be.

I would argue that the system is actually so good (but imperfect) that people overestimate how good it is, and let their guard down.

If a system were more error prone, people would not trust it so much.

Re: Tesla must pay portion of $329M damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

#109

Post by tzs »

xnx wrote: post #95
bko wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want Tesla's behavior to change - and other automakers take notice and not repeat the behavior - then the fine must be meaningful to them. What behavior do you want them to change? Remove FSD from their cars? It's been nearly 10 years since released and over 3bn miles driven. There's one case where someone died while fetching his cell phone. You would think if it was really dangerous, people would be dying i…

> What behavior do you want them to change? Don't advertise their driver assist system as "full self driving".

The system involved in this crash was never advertised as "full self driving".

Re: Tesla must pay portion of $329M damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

#110

Post by metabagel »

nullc wrote: post #39
thorum wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The product simply should not be called Autopilot. Anyone with any common sense could predict that many people will (quite reasonably) assume that a feature called Autopilot functions as a true autopilot, and that misunderstanding will lead to fatalities.

A true autopilot is a system on a boat or aircraft that keeps it on a set heading. ISTM in this case that's what the autopilot did.

Boats and aircraft are both different from automobiles. They have full freedom of movement. You can't set a course in the same way with an automobile, because the automobile will need to follow a roadway and possibly make turns at intersections. Boats and aircraft can have waypoints, but those waypoints can be mostly arbitrary, whereas a car needs to conform its path to the roadway, traffic, signage, etc.

It's an entirely different domain.

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