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Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

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Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#471

Post by dbasedweeb »

theluketaylor wrote: post #470
patcheudor wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>t's a tool to help attentive drivers avoid accidents that might have otherwise occurred. This needs far more discussion. I just don't buy it. I don't believe that you can have a car engaged in auto-drive mode and remain attentive. I think our psychology won't allow it. When driving, I find that I must be engaged and on long trips I don't even enable cruise control because taking the accelerator input away from me is…

>I don't even enable cruise control because taking the accelerator input away from me is enough to cause my mind to wander You're not alone. I find the act of modulating my speed is what keeps me focused on the task of driving safely. Steering alone isn't enough; I can stay in my lane without tracking the vehicles around me or fully comprehending road conditions. Until a Level 5 autonomous car is ready to drive me po…

The problem as always with driving is that you can be as attentive, sober, cautious as humanly possible... while the guy who jumps the median into your windscreen may not be. We need to be more concerned and proactive about stopping this running experiment with half-asses automation in which we all unwillingly participate. I want lvl 5 automation just like anyone, but I don’t believe it’s anywhere close, and I’m not interested in being part of a Tesla or Uber’s attempt to be even richer.

Public roads are not laboratories. It’s not just Tesla owners who are participating in this, it’s everyone on the road with them.

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#473

Post by hyperbole »

pstuart wrote: post #458
hyperbole wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one dies so someone 10 years from now can watch a full episode of the family guy unimpeded for the duration of their commute. The human toll is irrelevant to the conversation, what's relevant is whether risks taken are being taken knowingly - you cannot market a self driving vehicle whose functionality "is 2x better than any human being" while simultaneously stating in your legal language to protect yourself: don'…

Plenty of people die right now because they just got a text or they had no other way home from the bar, etc. The human toll is absolutely relevant to the conversation: this is about people dying now and in the future. It seems cruel to discuss it in a "I'll sacrifice X to save Y" later, but it can reasonably be reduced to that. I think it's safe to assume that this will drastically reduce driving related injuries and…

It's a deceptive to assume autopilot saves lives when it too has taken them. The number of people with access to auto pilot is far fewer to statistically determine how many more center divider deaths we might have if everyone were it's passenger.

Is the life taken by auto pilot worth less than the life taken by the aggressive driver who takes out an innocent driver? No.

I hope we eventually save lives as in net improvement in current death totals by using these technologies but the risks are not well communicated, the marketing is entirely out of sync with the risks and the "martyrs" we create thus to me look like victims.

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#474

Post by josto »

The line about fundamental legal/moral principle being a broken promise is dead wrong. Who wrote this? Tesla has a horrible pr firm appareantly.

The fundamental principle is standard of care. One could say it was reasonably foreseeable this would happen since the driver reported it! Tesla was negligent and their best hope would be to show comparative fault by the driver. But forget negligence.

Products liability is strict liability. Someone died here. Causation is the only issue and imo it looks bad for Tesla.The fundamental premise of both moral and legal liability is a broken promise, and there was none here Very very stupid statement on their part. They should have quietly settled this. Bad pr and legally peroulous. As a shareholder this makes me question their competence to deal with these matters. They should fix the issue and settle. All the discovery and everything about mobile eye and radar. Horrible strategy by Tesla. It’s like they take it personal since auto pilot failed. People are dumb. It doesn’t matter if they warned him to keep his hands on the wheel. Someone died. There was an alternative design that was safer. Whoever wrote that statement should be fired

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#475

Post by skywhopper »

Tesla's marketing around this feature is completely at odds with what they say when a problem happens. If you are required to be paying attention with hands on the wheel at all times, then the "Autopilot" name itself is fraudulent, not to mention all the blather about how it's safer than a human driver. Even if self-driving cars were imminent (they aren't), this sort of blatant misrepresentation by the likes of Tesla (a company who surely doesn't need the lure of self-driving to sell its cars) would set back consumer interest and adoption by years.

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#476

Post by taneq »

rohit2412 wrote: post #422
slg wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the classic trolley[1] problem and Tesla is flipping the switch on the tracks. I don't think there is anything to indicate that Tesla's approach is leading to more deaths. Considering there has only been two confirmed fatalities in which autopilot was partially at fault (AFAIK), I would bet that autopilot is still well in the positives in "lives saved" versus "lives ended". Whether that is the right ethical or…

This isn't limited to no autopilot vs full autopilot. If autopilot is so good at correcting a drunk driver's accident, then let it run in a shadow mode only making corrective actions in emergencies. Why is AEB bundled in with Autosteer in all stats? AEB is undoubtedly good, Autosteer is debatable.

> AEB is undoubtedly good, Autosteer is debatable.

AEB is clearly unreliable, as it didn't automatically slow the car in any of these cases where the car was pointed directly at a significant-sized stationary solid object.

I did worry about this sort of thing back when they mentioned nuisance trips of the radar-based AEB system, and that to deal with them they were basically just geotagging where these nuisance trips happened and disabling the system near those points. I'd like to know if AEB was actually active at the location where the fatality occurred.

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#477

Post by mozumder »

Silhouette wrote: post #439
mozumder wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People love their cars too much. Cars should just be phased out in favor of mass transit everywhere. Yes, you can live without the convenience of your car. No really, you can. Now think about how you would enable that to happen. What local politicians are you willing to write to, or support, in order to enable a better mass transit option for you? And how would you enable more people to support those local politician…

Yes, you can live without the convenience of your car. No really, you can. Maybe, but unless you can change the laws of nature, you can't build a mass transit system that can serve everyone full-time with reasonable efficiency and cost-effectiveness, and that's just meeting the minimum requirement of getting from A to B, without getting into all the other downsides of public vs. private transportation in terms of hea…

OK. Anything else you want to make up?

Let's see what that imagination can craft.

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#478

Post by oblib »

As far as I know Tesla has never endorsed letting their cars drive themselves for more than a short time and only when traffic and road conditions are optimal. I'd be fine with anyone showing me otherwise but I'm pretty sure I seen statements specifically saying do not use the autopilot in city highway traffic conditions.

The driver is the only one to blame in this case. That's not a cold or heartless thing to do, it's just a fact.

Tesla cannot remain silent about this. They have to tell people to not do what this driver was doing. It could have been worse. He could have killed others driving nearby.

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#479

Post by Fins »

kbutler wrote: post #469
Fins wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not really sure if development of SDVs is really that important, but even if it were, your proposal would only be acceptable if it were you and Mr. Musk racing your Teslas on Tesla's private proving grounds. Somewhere in the Kalahari desert seems to be an acceptable location. The moment people "making a sacrifice" are unsuspecting customers, and eventually innocent bystanders you are veering very much into Dr. M…

"Nearly 1.3 million people die in road crashes each year, on average 3,287 deaths a day. An additional 20-50 million are injured or disabled. " And $879B in USA per year.

So we should kill even more people, who had never signed up to be guinea pigs, so that maybe there will be a self-driving car at some point? Which most of those dying in those crashes will not be able to afford anytime soon anyway...

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#480

Post by skywhopper »

fapjacks wrote: post #155
patcheudor wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>t's a tool to help attentive drivers avoid accidents that might have otherwise occurred. This needs far more discussion. I just don't buy it. I don't believe that you can have a car engaged in auto-drive mode and remain attentive. I think our psychology won't allow it. When driving, I find that I must be engaged and on long trips I don't even enable cruise control because taking the accelerator input away from me is…

I have to preface my post to say that I think developing self-driving automobiles is so important that it's worth the implied cost of potentially tens of thousands of lives in order to perfect the technology, because that's what people do; make sacrifices to improve the world we live in so that future generations don't have to know the same problem. But I think you're right. I think the "best" way to move forward unt…

While I agree with your conclusion, the opening line strikes me as silly. Why is it "so important" to have self-driving cars? These cars that can't detect stationary objects directly in front of them are nowhere close to the self-driving pipe dream that's been around for a century. Maybe by 2118 we'll be making more progress.
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