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Am I extreme in feeling someone should go to jail for that? It was bad enough when they were originally advertising it, but now that they're defending it even

Am I extreme in feeling someone should go to jail for that? It was bad enough when they were originally advertising it, but now that they're defending it even after people died...ugh. https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/28/17172178/tesla-model-x-crash-autopilot-fire-investigation https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/28/17172178/tesla-model-x-cr...

GW150914 8y ago
I think if anything you’re overly conservative for thinking somone rather than many people need jail time for it. I would look up the line of people who made and supported the decision for that kind of fraudulent marketing and drag them all into court.
earenndil 8y ago
So...one person died? Do you know how many people die in normal, non-self-driving cars? It's never possible to get 100% accuracy.
- GW150914 8y ago
  If those people die because the car fails catastrophically, and predictably, rather than the usual reasons it would be news. This is not about 100% or “the perfect is the enemy of the good” or any bullshit Utopianism. This is about a company marketing a flawed product deceptively for money, while letting useful idiots cover their asses with dreams of level 5 automation that aren’t even close to the horizon.
- Judgmentality 8y ago
  One person died from that accident. There are now at least 4 deaths where Tesla's autopilot was involved (most of the deaths in China don't get much publicity, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are more). And the statistics do not back up your claim that Tesla is safer (despite their attempts to spin it that way).
  - Aqueous 8y ago
    This seems to contradict your assertion: http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-autopilot-cuts-crash-rates-by-40-government-finds-2017-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-autopilot-cuts-crash-ra...
    - frgtpsswrdlame 8y ago
      No, the NHTSA report says nothing about how Tesla's autopilot compares to human driving. Here are two comments I made last week about this: In that study there are two buckets, one which is total Tesla miles in TACC-enabled cars and then after the update total Tesla miles in cars with TACC + Autosteer and they calculated on airbag deployments. Human driven miles are going to dominate both of those buckets and there's a reason the NHTSA report makes zero claims about Tesla's safety relative to human drivers. It's totally outside the scope of the study. Then add in that some researchers who are skeptical of the methodology and have been asking for the raw data from NHTSA/Tesla have yet to receive it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16932350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16932350 Autosteer, however, is relatively unique to Tesla. That’s what makes singling out Autosteer as the source of a 40 percent drop so curious. Forward collision warning and automatic emergency braking were introduced just months before the introduction of Autosteer in October 2015. A previous IIHS study shows that both the collision warning and auto emergency braking can deliver a similar reduction in crashes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16932406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16932406
      - PersistentCough 8y ago
        I'm not sure what "safer" means. Not sure what posting your insistence in other threads has to do with this. 10x or 100x the number of deaths would be small price to pay to get everyone in autonomous vehicles. It's air travel, all over again and there's a price to pay.
        frgtpsswrdlame 8y ago
        >I'm not sure what "safer" means. You can define it however you want. By any common sense definition of safety Tesla has not proven that their autopilot is 'safer' than a human driver. >10x or 100x the number of deaths would be small price to pay to get everyone in autonomous vehicles. This supposes a couple things. Mainly that autonomous vehicles will become safer than human drivers, that you know roughly how many humans will have to die to achieve that and that those humans have to die to achieve it. Those are all unknown at this point and even if you disagree about the first one (which I expect you might) you still have to grant me two and three.
- rescripting 8y ago
  I hand you a gun and say "you can point this gun at anyone, pull the trigger, and it wont harm them." You point the gun at a crowd, pull the trigger, it goes off and kills someone. Who do you blame? No one is saying guns, or cars, aren't dangerous. However this kind of false advertising leads people to use cars in dangerous ways while believing they are safe because they've been lied to. (Side note, there is some fine print you never read that says the safe-gun technology only works when you point the gun at a single person and doesn't work on crowds.)
  - Retric 8y ago
    Safer than human hardware does not imply safe. It means this will kill people but fewer people than humans would and they have actual data that backs this assertion up. The benchmark is not an alert, cautious, and sober driver because that's often not how actual people drive. So right now it's often safer to drive other times it really is safer to use autopilot, net result fewer people die.
    - DennisP 8y ago
      But if you do happen to be an alert, cautious, and sober driver, it'd be unfortunate if Tesla's marketing led you to overly rely on Autopilot. Ideally Tesla's marketing would say it's safer than drunk, sleepy, and reckless drivers, though it might not sell as many Autopilots.
      - jacobush 8y ago
        Drunk, sleepy and reckless drives from an age bracket not normally buying premium sedans.
      - heurist 8y ago
        Autopilot should not be accessible to drivers until their driving habits have been assessed and baselined. If autopilot is known to drive more safely than the individual human driver in environments X, Y, and Z then it should be made available in those environments, if not encouraged. That might not make an easy sell since a major value prop is inaccessible to many of the people who really want to use it, but it's the most reasonable, safest path. I also imagine that cars will learn from both human and each others' driving patterns over time, which (under effective guidance) should enable an enormous improvement in a relatively short period of time.
- LoSboccacc 8y ago
  > Do you know how many people die in normal, non-self-driving cars false equivalency. you need at least compare per mile, at best by driver demographic since most tesla drivers are in the high income and maybe in the safety conscious bracket
- coldtea 8y ago
  Many people also die when they fall from the stairs. But if you build faulty staircases that make people slip, they can still put you in jail or sue you. Same if you push them down the stairs.
- dghughes 8y ago
  Self-driving cars or Tesla autopilot?
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
Jail, no? Financial ruin for the company that was willing to put that BS below it's letterhead? Yeah, sure, in proportion with the harm caused. That said, human life isn't sacred. It and everything else gets trades for dollars all the time. A death or three shouldn't cripple a big company like Tesla unless they were playing so fast and loose that there's significant punitive damages. In a large company like Tesla it shouldn't be marketing's job to restrain itself. That's not safe at that scale. There should be someone or a group who's job it is to prevent marketing from getting ahead of reality just like it's security's job to spend all day playing whack-a-mole with the stupid ideas devs (especially the web ones) dream up. Efficiently mediating conflicting interests like that is what the corporate control structure is for. People using your product in accordance with your marketing should be considered almost the same as in accordance with your documentation. While "people dying while using the product in accordance with TFM" is not treated as strict liability it's pushing awfully close. I see it as a simple case of the company owning up to its actions. It failed to manage itself properly, marketing got ahead of reality. You screw up and someone gets hurt then you pay up.
- mrj 8y ago
  "That said, human life isn't sacred. It and everything else gets trades for dollars all the time." Wow. Uhm, slavery is illegal if you haven't heard. We made it illegal because life is sacred.
  - sologoub 8y ago
    OP is probably referring to the fact that in wrongful death suits, society has put a very tangible financial number on the value of human life. This made it possible for corporations to make trade-off between profit and liability, giving the potential that someone could get enough profit to justify risking others’ lives. Punitive damages go part way to help prevent this, but not far enough to guarantee that it never happens. Had the society truly believed life to be sacred, I suspect we’d have very different business practices and penalties that are not limited to financial ruin.
    - 8y ago
hacker11235 8y ago
While I don't necessarily agree with how they've advertised it I think they are legally safe. All Model 3's DO have the HARDWARE to support full-self driving, even if the software is not there. And regarding the software, it has been shown to be about 40% safer than humans where it is used, which is what they've claimed.
- stdgy 8y ago
  How do we know the hardware will adequately support full self-driving if it doesn't actually exist yet? That seems overly optimistic, if not an outright fabrication.
  - tomp 8y ago
    Because humans can do driving with comparable (worse, actually) hardware. Superhuman reflexes mean that software with superhuman driving abilities can exist.
    - mhermher 8y ago
      Humans also have human brains, which are much more important to driving than eyes.
      - hacker11235 8y ago
        This is the part that can be emulated in software. All you have to prove is that what ever platform/language you're using for the programming is Turing Complete, which is the case for almost all of the most popular languages.
        mhermher 8y ago
        So can I run Crysis on my TI calculator? I'm sure whatever platform/language is running on it is Turing Complete. I think you missed the point that the brain is also hardware.
jcranmer 8y ago
Musk's statements, and Tesla in general, have gone to cultivating an impression that Tesla almost has self-driving. An impression that, okay, it's not perfect, but it's good enough that you can act like it is for most of the time. This impression is far enough from the truth that it's fundamentally dishonest, particularly when the response from Tesla after incidents amounts to "the driver is completely at fault here, we don't need to change anything" (in other words, their marketing says it's basically self-driving, their legal defense says self-driving is only at your own risk). In the moralistic sense, yes, Tesla needs to be reprimanded for its actions. However, lying in this manner is often well-protected by law, if you manage to include enough legalese disclaimers somewhere, and I suspect Tesla has enough lawyers to make sure that legalese is sufficient to disclaim all liability.
nojvek 8y ago
US advertising laws are very lax, just like data collection laws. You can getaway with saying a lot of shit in the name of advertising. Deaths caused by Uber and Tesla hold little repercussions for them other than bad PR. The US govt celebrates removing regulations which benefit its corporations at the cost of its citizens

GW150914 8y ago

I think if anything you’re overly conservative for thinking somone rather than many people need jail time for it. I would look up the line of people who made and supported the decision for that kind of fraudulent marketing and drag them all into court.

earenndil 8y ago

So...one person died? Do you know how many people die in normal, non-self-driving cars? It's never possible to get 100% accuracy.

GW150914 8y ago
If those people die because the car fails catastrophically, and predictably, rather than the usual reasons it would be news. This is not about 100% or “the perfect is the enemy of the good” or any bullshit Utopianism. This is about a company marketing a flawed product deceptively for money, while letting useful idiots cover their asses with dreams of level 5 automation that aren’t even close to the horizon.
Judgmentality 8y ago
One person died from that accident. There are now at least 4 deaths where Tesla's autopilot was involved (most of the deaths in China don't get much publicity, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are more). And the statistics do not back up your claim that Tesla is safer (despite their attempts to spin it that way).
- Aqueous 8y ago
  This seems to contradict your assertion: http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-autopilot-cuts-crash-rates-by-40-government-finds-2017-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-autopilot-cuts-crash-ra...
  - frgtpsswrdlame 8y ago
    No, the NHTSA report says nothing about how Tesla's autopilot compares to human driving. Here are two comments I made last week about this: In that study there are two buckets, one which is total Tesla miles in TACC-enabled cars and then after the update total Tesla miles in cars with TACC + Autosteer and they calculated on airbag deployments. Human driven miles are going to dominate both of those buckets and there's a reason the NHTSA report makes zero claims about Tesla's safety relative to human drivers. It's totally outside the scope of the study. Then add in that some researchers who are skeptical of the methodology and have been asking for the raw data from NHTSA/Tesla have yet to receive it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16932350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16932350 Autosteer, however, is relatively unique to Tesla. That’s what makes singling out Autosteer as the source of a 40 percent drop so curious. Forward collision warning and automatic emergency braking were introduced just months before the introduction of Autosteer in October 2015. A previous IIHS study shows that both the collision warning and auto emergency braking can deliver a similar reduction in crashes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16932406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16932406
    - PersistentCough 8y ago
      I'm not sure what "safer" means. Not sure what posting your insistence in other threads has to do with this. 10x or 100x the number of deaths would be small price to pay to get everyone in autonomous vehicles. It's air travel, all over again and there's a price to pay.
      - frgtpsswrdlame 8y ago
        >I'm not sure what "safer" means. You can define it however you want. By any common sense definition of safety Tesla has not proven that their autopilot is 'safer' than a human driver. >10x or 100x the number of deaths would be small price to pay to get everyone in autonomous vehicles. This supposes a couple things. Mainly that autonomous vehicles will become safer than human drivers, that you know roughly how many humans will have to die to achieve that and that those humans have to die to achieve it. Those are all unknown at this point and even if you disagree about the first one (which I expect you might) you still have to grant me two and three.
rescripting 8y ago
I hand you a gun and say "you can point this gun at anyone, pull the trigger, and it wont harm them." You point the gun at a crowd, pull the trigger, it goes off and kills someone. Who do you blame? No one is saying guns, or cars, aren't dangerous. However this kind of false advertising leads people to use cars in dangerous ways while believing they are safe because they've been lied to. (Side note, there is some fine print you never read that says the safe-gun technology only works when you point the gun at a single person and doesn't work on crowds.)
- Retric 8y ago
  Safer than human hardware does not imply safe. It means this will kill people but fewer people than humans would and they have actual data that backs this assertion up. The benchmark is not an alert, cautious, and sober driver because that's often not how actual people drive. So right now it's often safer to drive other times it really is safer to use autopilot, net result fewer people die.
  - DennisP 8y ago
    But if you do happen to be an alert, cautious, and sober driver, it'd be unfortunate if Tesla's marketing led you to overly rely on Autopilot. Ideally Tesla's marketing would say it's safer than drunk, sleepy, and reckless drivers, though it might not sell as many Autopilots.
    - jacobush 8y ago
      Drunk, sleepy and reckless drives from an age bracket not normally buying premium sedans.
    - heurist 8y ago
      Autopilot should not be accessible to drivers until their driving habits have been assessed and baselined. If autopilot is known to drive more safely than the individual human driver in environments X, Y, and Z then it should be made available in those environments, if not encouraged. That might not make an easy sell since a major value prop is inaccessible to many of the people who really want to use it, but it's the most reasonable, safest path. I also imagine that cars will learn from both human and each others' driving patterns over time, which (under effective guidance) should enable an enormous improvement in a relatively short period of time.
LoSboccacc 8y ago
> Do you know how many people die in normal, non-self-driving cars false equivalency. you need at least compare per mile, at best by driver demographic since most tesla drivers are in the high income and maybe in the safety conscious bracket
coldtea 8y ago
Many people also die when they fall from the stairs. But if you build faulty staircases that make people slip, they can still put you in jail or sue you. Same if you push them down the stairs.
dghughes 8y ago
Self-driving cars or Tesla autopilot?

dsfyu404ed 8y ago

Jail, no? Financial ruin for the company that was willing to put that BS below it's letterhead? Yeah, sure, in proportion with the harm caused. That said, human life isn't sacred. It and everything else gets trades for dollars all the time. A death or three shouldn't cripple a big company like Tesla unless they were playing so fast and loose that there's significant punitive damages. In a large company like Tesla it shouldn't be marketing's job to restrain itself. That's not safe at that scale. There should be someone or a group who's job it is to prevent marketing from getting ahead of reality just like it's security's job to spend all day playing whack-a-mole with the stupid ideas devs (especially the web ones) dream up. Efficiently mediating conflicting interests like that is what the corporate control structure is for. People using your product in accordance with your marketing should be considered almost the same as in accordance with your documentation. While "people dying while using the product in accordance with TFM" is not treated as strict liability it's pushing awfully close. I see it as a simple case of the company owning up to its actions. It failed to manage itself properly, marketing got ahead of reality. You screw up and someone gets hurt then you pay up.

mrj 8y ago
"That said, human life isn't sacred. It and everything else gets trades for dollars all the time." Wow. Uhm, slavery is illegal if you haven't heard. We made it illegal because life is sacred.
- sologoub 8y ago
  OP is probably referring to the fact that in wrongful death suits, society has put a very tangible financial number on the value of human life. This made it possible for corporations to make trade-off between profit and liability, giving the potential that someone could get enough profit to justify risking others’ lives. Punitive damages go part way to help prevent this, but not far enough to guarantee that it never happens. Had the society truly believed life to be sacred, I suspect we’d have very different business practices and penalties that are not limited to financial ruin.
  - 8y ago

hacker11235 8y ago

While I don't necessarily agree with how they've advertised it I think they are legally safe. All Model 3's DO have the HARDWARE to support full-self driving, even if the software is not there. And regarding the software, it has been shown to be about 40% safer than humans where it is used, which is what they've claimed.

stdgy 8y ago
How do we know the hardware will adequately support full self-driving if it doesn't actually exist yet? That seems overly optimistic, if not an outright fabrication.
- tomp 8y ago
  Because humans can do driving with comparable (worse, actually) hardware. Superhuman reflexes mean that software with superhuman driving abilities can exist.
  - mhermher 8y ago
    Humans also have human brains, which are much more important to driving than eyes.
    - hacker11235 8y ago
      This is the part that can be emulated in software. All you have to prove is that what ever platform/language you're using for the programming is Turing Complete, which is the case for almost all of the most popular languages.
      - mhermher 8y ago
        So can I run Crysis on my TI calculator? I'm sure whatever platform/language is running on it is Turing Complete. I think you missed the point that the brain is also hardware.

jcranmer 8y ago

Musk's statements, and Tesla in general, have gone to cultivating an impression that Tesla almost has self-driving. An impression that, okay, it's not perfect, but it's good enough that you can act like it is for most of the time. This impression is far enough from the truth that it's fundamentally dishonest, particularly when the response from Tesla after incidents amounts to "the driver is completely at fault here, we don't need to change anything" (in other words, their marketing says it's basically self-driving, their legal defense says self-driving is only at your own risk). In the moralistic sense, yes, Tesla needs to be reprimanded for its actions. However, lying in this manner is often well-protected by law, if you manage to include enough legalese disclaimers somewhere, and I suspect Tesla has enough lawyers to make sure that legalese is sufficient to disclaim all liability.

nojvek 8y ago

US advertising laws are very lax, just like data collection laws. You can getaway with saying a lot of shit in the name of advertising. Deaths caused by Uber and Tesla hold little repercussions for them other than bad PR. The US govt celebrates removing regulations which benefit its corporations at the cost of its citizens