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I drive a Tesla. If my car rear ends another car, that's my fault. Doesn't matter if I had Autopilot on or not. Imagine if you were rear ended by a Toyota and

I drive a Tesla. If my car rear ends another car, that's my fault. Doesn't matter if I had Autopilot on or not. Imagine if you were rear ended by a Toyota and the driver said "it was on cruise control, shrug." Would you talk to NTSB or NHTSA about that? Probably not. The only scenario I can imagine that'd warrant investigation is if the driver were completely unable to override Autopilot. Similar investigations have been started by NTSB when Toyota had issues with their cruise control systems several years ago.

amelius 5y ago
> I drive a Tesla. If my car rear ends another car, that's my fault. Doesn't matter if I had Autopilot on or not. You can have a similar argument for: if I'm drunk while driving that's my choice; if I don't cause any accidents, it should be none of anybody's business that I'm drunk. You see, it doesn't work like that. If Autopilot poses a significant risk to other road users, then an investigation is warranted.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  An NTSB investigation is a separate thing from an accident investigation for fault or insurance purposes. The NTSB does not investigate a drunk driver, that does not mean the drunk driver would be free of fault or charges.
  - MerelyMortal 5y ago
    A more apt comparison would be if OP was hit by a drunk driver, and there were no laws against drunk driving. It would be appropriate to ask the government to investigate whether or not drunk driving is safe, because it could happen to many more people.
    - situationista 5y ago
      Except that both Tesla and the law make it clear that in a Level 2 system the driver is responsible at all times, regardless of whether Autopilot is engaged or not.
      - riffraff 5y ago
        To stretch the metaphor further, I don't think it's fair to say Tesla makes it clear. Or better, it's not all the story. People would be less upset with the drunk driver and more with the beer manufacture if they had been imbibing "alcohol free beer" which actually was not alcohol free.
        _ea1k 5y ago
        Have you used it? Because its as clear as any system that I've ever used with a clear statement on each activation. Most other systems are far less clear, IMO.
        manicdee 5y ago
        The car tells you "please keep your hands on the wheel". It then proceeds to nag you if you don't put enough torque on the wheel, and then brings the car to a halt in the middle of the road. Please don't propagate myths about "Tesla doesn't make it clear that you have to be in control of the vehicle." My AP has many times disengaged because despite paying attention to the driving I wasn't putting enough torque on the wheel to convince AP that actually had my hands on the wheel.
      - HWR_14 5y ago
        And a drunk driver is still responsible at all times. That doesn't change the fact that we outlawed drunk driving because it made things worse.
- asdfsd234234444 5y ago
  lol, what
- wyldfire 5y ago
  > Autopilot poses a significant risk to other road users, then an investigation is warranted. You could fault their methods but NTSB is doing just that: waiting for a trend to emerge that would warrant such an investigation. I'm not suggesting that Tesla's design is not the cause but if the driver were lying in order to shift blame, then NTSB would end up wasting their resources investigating it.
- moate 5y ago
  No, you're right, none of what you're talking about works like that. There was a traffic accident. There are a variety of "automated" driving features in modern cars: Auto-park, cruise control, auto-pilot. Any one of these features could, under "less than ideal" circumstances, cause an accident that doesn't warrant contacting national authorities. Well before any regulatory body is going to do anything, private insurance would. They're going to investigate in an effort to determine fault and facts. Was autopilot to blame, or did the user spill a cup of coffee in the passenger's seat that caused them to take their eyes off the road, etc. The idea that a national regulatory body is going to start looking into a single car crash seems great until you start thinking about the expense that would create for the taxpayers. Bureaucracy just isn't built to be agile, for better or worse. Similarly, if you drive drunk and don't cause an accident, nobody will know. This doesn't make it legal, and nobody is trying to argue a point even tangentially similar to that. This is a straw man, and a rather obvious one. There is no national group that would ever investigate a drunk driving crash (assuming that was the only relevant information in the case). That's a local law enforcement issue. TL;dr- The feds don't care about a sample size of 1 fender bender with no fatalities.
  - Brian_K_White 5y ago
    The class of problem called driving while incapacitated was studied and special regulatory attention was applied to it. An automated driving system that can offer to function while incapacitated without the operater even being informed that there is any problem, is a different problem from an operator that neglected to press the brake pedal. The brake pedal itself and the rest of the braking system is absolutely required to meet a whole bunch of fitness standards.
- ajross 5y ago
  > If Autopilot poses a significant risk to other road users, then an investigation is warranted. Except there's no evidence that it does. I drive a Tesla. I've seen AP brake hard in circumstances where a distracted driver would have failed to notice. The system works. It does not work perfectly. But all it has to do to make that "if" clause false is work better than drivers do, and that's a very low bar. Tesla themselves publish data on this, and cars get in fewer accidents with AP engaged. (So then the unskewers jump in and argue about how that's not apples and oranges, and we all end up in circles of nuance and no one changes their opinion. But it doesn't matter what opinions are because facts are all that matter here, and what facts exist say AP is safer than driving.)
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    At the risk of beating a dead horse, the issue is that AP engaged/disengaged isn't a random test, it's a user choice. Presumably people leave AP on when the outside conditions are inherently safer per mile (including, for example, on a highway). If Tesla randomly made AP unavailable some days to some drivers and ran a controlled test, that would be compelling.
    - ajross 5y ago
      You are absolutely beating a dead horse, sorry. This argument gets made repeatedly every time that report gets mentioned and... frankly I'm sick of going through it every time. Nitpicking against a result you don't like without presenting contrary data is just useless pontification. It proves nothing, and has no value but supporting your own priors vs. inconvenient evidence. Find some data. I mean... there are two million of these cars on the street now, and all but a tiny handful of early Roadsters and S's have full featured autopilot. If there was a significant safety signal in all that data somewhere it would be very clear against the noise background now, and it isn't.
      - HWR_14 5y ago
        My point wasn't that I had contradicting data. My point was that the data Tesla publishes isn't valuable. It's a different statement. The premise could be right or wrong.
- m0zg 5y ago
  > If Autopilot poses a significant risk to other road users It does not, if you use it as Tesla tells you to use it - paying attention to the road at all times and with your hands on the wheel. If you don't do that, Autopilot is probably still better than distracted driving - over the years I sometimes would catch myself drifting off in my thoughts as I was driving to the point where I wasn't even sure how I drove my car for the past few seconds. I bet this happens to others, too, and often. Between that and even semi-autonomous Autopilot, Autopilot seems like a safer choice, and it'll only get better from here on out, though I don't think we're anywhere near real "FSD" where you'd be able to read a newspaper as the car drives itself.
_ea1k 5y ago
I think there is a good argument that now is a good time for a liability shift for certain types of accidents with TACC. TACC should never be rear ending people.
- mistrial9 5y ago
  a bad actor can easily create an accident of this description, no?
  - _ea1k 5y ago
    How? Hard braking shouldn't do it. Cutting in front potentially could, but that'd be a different problem.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  It’s a driver aid, not a driver replacement. I’m responsible for where my airplane autopilot takes the airplane (in large part because I’ll be the first one to arrive at the accident scene). Why shouldn’t the driver be responsible for accidents in the car they’re driving at the current level of driver assist technology?
  - _ea1k 5y ago
    Yeah, I know, but I'm starting to think that we've reached a point that this shouldn't be an excuse for straight up rear end collisions. They should be forced to make the black box available and take liability if the driver didn't take over. There's no reason that TACC shouldn't be able to handle the basic job of not running into the car in front of it in the vast majority of circumstances.
cinntaile 5y ago
The big black box makes a mistake and you voluntarily accept the blame? I really don't get this train of thought. I know that this is legally correct, but at some point in time along the technological advancement of self driving technology we'll have to stop blaming ourselves and legally shift the blame to whoever created the self driving tech instead. Edit: Updated wording to make it less confusing. From system to whoever created the self driving tech.
- movedx 5y ago
  Because as the driver you're responsible for the tool you're using to drive your self to your destination. That means you're responsible for whether or not you use Autopilot, do 200kmph, take your hands off of the steering wheel, turn your lights on at night, and everything else associated with the operation of that vehicle. > ... at some point in time along the technological advancement of self driving technology we'll have to stop blaming ourselves. No we don't. We built it, so we're responsible for it and the consequences associated with its operation, regardless of how well it's engineered or how smart we think we are.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    The question is the driver responsible? Should it be the owner? Should it be the company who made the failing product? If your toaster blows up and kills someone a solid case against the maker of toasterb
  - dafoex 5y ago
    I didn't build it, Tesla did, and I personally think the company that signed off on "touch screen controlled window wipers" is the one with the most liability in autopilot failures.
    - dafoex 5y ago
      Context: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53666222 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53666222
    - deleted 5y ago
jdavis703 5y ago
Based on videos and observed driving behavior, it seems the marketing and documentation for Autopilot is ineffective at communicating to drivers that Autopilot is basically advanced cruise control. If this is correct, it represents a systemic issue that should be investigated by the NTSB or NHTSA.
- cma 5y ago
  https://tesla.com/autopilot https://tesla.com/autopilot In the video there it says: "THE PERSON IN THE SEAT IS ONLY THERE FOR LEGAL REASONS. HE IS NOT DOING ANYTHING. THE CAR IS DRIVING ITSELF." Total lie unless they are psycopaths and would be willing to run it with no one in the seat if not for legal reasons. In other words unless they were willing to murder if murder were legal--the video is from 2018 or maybe even earlier, where we know they were nowhere near ready for driverless.
  - wang_li 5y ago
    Did you consider that that text is about the video and not about the feature in their cars as sold to the public?
    - cma 5y ago
      Do you think they could have filmed that video with no driver in the seat without high risk of killing someone? Only "legal reasons" kept them from doing it, they have no ethics? On top of that it greatly mislead people about how soon it would be, and how far along they were. Buyers who they were charging like $9,000 to at the time.
- soheil 5y ago
  The moment you use Autopilot it's evident that it's basically a fancy cruise control. You're assuming some people would not interfere with Autopilot in any scenario. To think somehow people with that much lack of common sense exist is odd. It shows a massive level of disregard for those people's ability to perform basic functions.
soheil 5y ago
It's so odd that in stories like this people don't even ask this simple question: did you try to brake? It's usually conveniently omitted from the story.
pempem 5y ago
This is so tremendously NOT a case of personal responsibility. A large portion of our economy attempts to rely on the belief of: "you said it would do x, it must do x". You bought a car, it promised functionality, it did not deliver and endangered another human/their property. This is the fault of the manufacturer. Here are some examples of non-autonomous driving cases where the manufacturer made a false promise: Volvo lawsuit: https://www.motorbiscuit.com/volvo-owners-seeking-class-action-lawsuit-after-10-years-for-annoying-problem/ https://www.motorbiscuit.com/volvo-owners-seeking-class-acti... Toyota recall after lawsuit https://www.industryweek.com/the-economy/article/21959153/toyota-agrees-to-11-billion-settlement-over-recalls https://www.industryweek.com/the-economy/article/21959153/to... Chevy lawsuit: https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/consumer-products/auto-news/1029777-recall-check-1b-chevy-bolt-recall-triggered-worldwide-after-continuing-battery-fires/ https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/consumer-pro... It is my sincere hope that we can enjoy Elon's persona without just letting Tesla off the hook of being a car company. Or really, a company.
- tiahura 5y ago
  Fortunately, in the US, responsibility usually isn't an all or nothing proposition. Tesla can be responsible for a FSD bug, the driver responsible for not paying attention, the driver in the other lane for swerving, the tire shop for not putting the tires on right, etc.
EastOfTruth 5y ago
> I drive a Tesla. If my car rear ends another car, that's my fault. Doesn't matter if I had Autopilot on or not. It is supposed to be super-self-driving... it has to count for something.
- buffington 5y ago
  No it's not. I didn't spend $10k for full self driving. That's not the same feature as Autopilot.
analog31 5y ago
I think that outside of a courtroom, it's possible to recognize "layers" of responsibility, for lack of a better term. I can think of a couple of scenarios: 1. In an industrial plant, equipment needs to be fitted with guards and other protective measures, even if it's arguable that sticking your hand into an exposed rotating mechanism, or grabbing a live electrical circuit, is your fault. If someone's hurt, and there's an investigation, the factory will be cited for not having the proper guards. From what I've read, this is one of the things that we now take for granted, but was hard won through labor activism resulting in a dramatic reduction in workplace deaths. 2. The European approach, where they assign "fault" for a crash, but at the same time investigate how the infrastructure can be redesigned to make the crash less likely. Yes I would hope that a regulatory body investigates the OP's crash. At the same time, I've read some comments in HN that Tesla drivers hover their foot over the accelerator in case of "ghost" braking. Naturally this is anecdotal. Still, the driver could have mistakenly stepped on the wrong pedal.
- tiahura 5y ago
  VERY generally, in the US, the jury assigns a percentage of fault to each party. E.g., Defendant 1 was 40% at fault, Defendant 2 51%, Defendant 3 5%, and the Plaintiff 4%. Plaintiff can collect 40% of his damages from D1, etc. Some states will allow Plaintiff to collect 96% from D2, and give D2 the right to collect the other defendants' proportionate share from them.
LeifCarrotson 5y ago
That may be the legal reality we live in - it's true that if a driver in a Toyota rear-ended someone else, there would be (and should be) no NTSB/NHTSA safety investigation. The driver was simply at fault, they should be appropriately penalized and will hopefully not do it again. The difference is that safety improvements to Autopilot can scale. Patch the software or upgrade the hardware to fix the root cause of this collision and future collisions can be avoided!

amelius 5y ago

> I drive a Tesla. If my car rear ends another car, that's my fault. Doesn't matter if I had Autopilot on or not. You can have a similar argument for: if I'm drunk while driving that's my choice; if I don't cause any accidents, it should be none of anybody's business that I'm drunk. You see, it doesn't work like that. If Autopilot poses a significant risk to other road users, then an investigation is warranted.

zamadatix 5y ago
An NTSB investigation is a separate thing from an accident investigation for fault or insurance purposes. The NTSB does not investigate a drunk driver, that does not mean the drunk driver would be free of fault or charges.
- MerelyMortal 5y ago
  A more apt comparison would be if OP was hit by a drunk driver, and there were no laws against drunk driving. It would be appropriate to ask the government to investigate whether or not drunk driving is safe, because it could happen to many more people.
  - situationista 5y ago
    Except that both Tesla and the law make it clear that in a Level 2 system the driver is responsible at all times, regardless of whether Autopilot is engaged or not.
    - riffraff 5y ago
      To stretch the metaphor further, I don't think it's fair to say Tesla makes it clear. Or better, it's not all the story. People would be less upset with the drunk driver and more with the beer manufacture if they had been imbibing "alcohol free beer" which actually was not alcohol free.
      - _ea1k 5y ago
        Have you used it? Because its as clear as any system that I've ever used with a clear statement on each activation. Most other systems are far less clear, IMO.
      - manicdee 5y ago
        The car tells you "please keep your hands on the wheel". It then proceeds to nag you if you don't put enough torque on the wheel, and then brings the car to a halt in the middle of the road. Please don't propagate myths about "Tesla doesn't make it clear that you have to be in control of the vehicle." My AP has many times disengaged because despite paying attention to the driving I wasn't putting enough torque on the wheel to convince AP that actually had my hands on the wheel.
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      And a drunk driver is still responsible at all times. That doesn't change the fact that we outlawed drunk driving because it made things worse.
asdfsd234234444 5y ago
lol, what
wyldfire 5y ago
> Autopilot poses a significant risk to other road users, then an investigation is warranted. You could fault their methods but NTSB is doing just that: waiting for a trend to emerge that would warrant such an investigation. I'm not suggesting that Tesla's design is not the cause but if the driver were lying in order to shift blame, then NTSB would end up wasting their resources investigating it.
moate 5y ago
No, you're right, none of what you're talking about works like that. There was a traffic accident. There are a variety of "automated" driving features in modern cars: Auto-park, cruise control, auto-pilot. Any one of these features could, under "less than ideal" circumstances, cause an accident that doesn't warrant contacting national authorities. Well before any regulatory body is going to do anything, private insurance would. They're going to investigate in an effort to determine fault and facts. Was autopilot to blame, or did the user spill a cup of coffee in the passenger's seat that caused them to take their eyes off the road, etc. The idea that a national regulatory body is going to start looking into a single car crash seems great until you start thinking about the expense that would create for the taxpayers. Bureaucracy just isn't built to be agile, for better or worse. Similarly, if you drive drunk and don't cause an accident, nobody will know. This doesn't make it legal, and nobody is trying to argue a point even tangentially similar to that. This is a straw man, and a rather obvious one. There is no national group that would ever investigate a drunk driving crash (assuming that was the only relevant information in the case). That's a local law enforcement issue. TL;dr- The feds don't care about a sample size of 1 fender bender with no fatalities.
- Brian_K_White 5y ago
  The class of problem called driving while incapacitated was studied and special regulatory attention was applied to it. An automated driving system that can offer to function while incapacitated without the operater even being informed that there is any problem, is a different problem from an operator that neglected to press the brake pedal. The brake pedal itself and the rest of the braking system is absolutely required to meet a whole bunch of fitness standards.
ajross 5y ago
> If Autopilot poses a significant risk to other road users, then an investigation is warranted. Except there's no evidence that it does. I drive a Tesla. I've seen AP brake hard in circumstances where a distracted driver would have failed to notice. The system works. It does not work perfectly. But all it has to do to make that "if" clause false is work better than drivers do, and that's a very low bar. Tesla themselves publish data on this, and cars get in fewer accidents with AP engaged. (So then the unskewers jump in and argue about how that's not apples and oranges, and we all end up in circles of nuance and no one changes their opinion. But it doesn't matter what opinions are because facts are all that matter here, and what facts exist say AP is safer than driving.)
- HWR_14 5y ago
  At the risk of beating a dead horse, the issue is that AP engaged/disengaged isn't a random test, it's a user choice. Presumably people leave AP on when the outside conditions are inherently safer per mile (including, for example, on a highway). If Tesla randomly made AP unavailable some days to some drivers and ran a controlled test, that would be compelling.
  - ajross 5y ago
    You are absolutely beating a dead horse, sorry. This argument gets made repeatedly every time that report gets mentioned and... frankly I'm sick of going through it every time. Nitpicking against a result you don't like without presenting contrary data is just useless pontification. It proves nothing, and has no value but supporting your own priors vs. inconvenient evidence. Find some data. I mean... there are two million of these cars on the street now, and all but a tiny handful of early Roadsters and S's have full featured autopilot. If there was a significant safety signal in all that data somewhere it would be very clear against the noise background now, and it isn't.
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      My point wasn't that I had contradicting data. My point was that the data Tesla publishes isn't valuable. It's a different statement. The premise could be right or wrong.
m0zg 5y ago
> If Autopilot poses a significant risk to other road users It does not, if you use it as Tesla tells you to use it - paying attention to the road at all times and with your hands on the wheel. If you don't do that, Autopilot is probably still better than distracted driving - over the years I sometimes would catch myself drifting off in my thoughts as I was driving to the point where I wasn't even sure how I drove my car for the past few seconds. I bet this happens to others, too, and often. Between that and even semi-autonomous Autopilot, Autopilot seems like a safer choice, and it'll only get better from here on out, though I don't think we're anywhere near real "FSD" where you'd be able to read a newspaper as the car drives itself.

_ea1k 5y ago

I think there is a good argument that now is a good time for a liability shift for certain types of accidents with TACC. TACC should never be rear ending people.

mistrial9 5y ago
a bad actor can easily create an accident of this description, no?
- _ea1k 5y ago
  How? Hard braking shouldn't do it. Cutting in front potentially could, but that'd be a different problem.
sokoloff 5y ago
It’s a driver aid, not a driver replacement. I’m responsible for where my airplane autopilot takes the airplane (in large part because I’ll be the first one to arrive at the accident scene). Why shouldn’t the driver be responsible for accidents in the car they’re driving at the current level of driver assist technology?
- _ea1k 5y ago
  Yeah, I know, but I'm starting to think that we've reached a point that this shouldn't be an excuse for straight up rear end collisions. They should be forced to make the black box available and take liability if the driver didn't take over. There's no reason that TACC shouldn't be able to handle the basic job of not running into the car in front of it in the vast majority of circumstances.

cinntaile 5y ago

The big black box makes a mistake and you voluntarily accept the blame? I really don't get this train of thought. I know that this is legally correct, but at some point in time along the technological advancement of self driving technology we'll have to stop blaming ourselves and legally shift the blame to whoever created the self driving tech instead. Edit: Updated wording to make it less confusing. From system to whoever created the self driving tech.

movedx 5y ago
Because as the driver you're responsible for the tool you're using to drive your self to your destination. That means you're responsible for whether or not you use Autopilot, do 200kmph, take your hands off of the steering wheel, turn your lights on at night, and everything else associated with the operation of that vehicle. > ... at some point in time along the technological advancement of self driving technology we'll have to stop blaming ourselves. No we don't. We built it, so we're responsible for it and the consequences associated with its operation, regardless of how well it's engineered or how smart we think we are.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  The question is the driver responsible? Should it be the owner? Should it be the company who made the failing product? If your toaster blows up and kills someone a solid case against the maker of toasterb
- dafoex 5y ago
  I didn't build it, Tesla did, and I personally think the company that signed off on "touch screen controlled window wipers" is the one with the most liability in autopilot failures.
  - dafoex 5y ago
    Context: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53666222 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53666222
  - deleted 5y ago

jdavis703 5y ago

Based on videos and observed driving behavior, it seems the marketing and documentation for Autopilot is ineffective at communicating to drivers that Autopilot is basically advanced cruise control. If this is correct, it represents a systemic issue that should be investigated by the NTSB or NHTSA.

cma 5y ago
https://tesla.com/autopilot https://tesla.com/autopilot In the video there it says: "THE PERSON IN THE SEAT IS ONLY THERE FOR LEGAL REASONS. HE IS NOT DOING ANYTHING. THE CAR IS DRIVING ITSELF." Total lie unless they are psycopaths and would be willing to run it with no one in the seat if not for legal reasons. In other words unless they were willing to murder if murder were legal--the video is from 2018 or maybe even earlier, where we know they were nowhere near ready for driverless.
- wang_li 5y ago
  Did you consider that that text is about the video and not about the feature in their cars as sold to the public?
  - cma 5y ago
    Do you think they could have filmed that video with no driver in the seat without high risk of killing someone? Only "legal reasons" kept them from doing it, they have no ethics? On top of that it greatly mislead people about how soon it would be, and how far along they were. Buyers who they were charging like $9,000 to at the time.
soheil 5y ago
The moment you use Autopilot it's evident that it's basically a fancy cruise control. You're assuming some people would not interfere with Autopilot in any scenario. To think somehow people with that much lack of common sense exist is odd. It shows a massive level of disregard for those people's ability to perform basic functions.

soheil 5y ago

It's so odd that in stories like this people don't even ask this simple question: did you try to brake? It's usually conveniently omitted from the story.

pempem 5y ago

This is so tremendously NOT a case of personal responsibility. A large portion of our economy attempts to rely on the belief of: "you said it would do x, it must do x". You bought a car, it promised functionality, it did not deliver and endangered another human/their property. This is the fault of the manufacturer. Here are some examples of non-autonomous driving cases where the manufacturer made a false promise: Volvo lawsuit: https://www.motorbiscuit.com/volvo-owners-seeking-class-action-lawsuit-after-10-years-for-annoying-problem/ https://www.motorbiscuit.com/volvo-owners-seeking-class-acti... Toyota recall after lawsuit https://www.industryweek.com/the-economy/article/21959153/toyota-agrees-to-11-billion-settlement-over-recalls https://www.industryweek.com/the-economy/article/21959153/to... Chevy lawsuit: https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/consumer-products/auto-news/1029777-recall-check-1b-chevy-bolt-recall-triggered-worldwide-after-continuing-battery-fires/ https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/consumer-pro... It is my sincere hope that we can enjoy Elon's persona without just letting Tesla off the hook of being a car company. Or really, a company.

tiahura 5y ago
Fortunately, in the US, responsibility usually isn't an all or nothing proposition. Tesla can be responsible for a FSD bug, the driver responsible for not paying attention, the driver in the other lane for swerving, the tire shop for not putting the tires on right, etc.

EastOfTruth 5y ago

> I drive a Tesla. If my car rear ends another car, that's my fault. Doesn't matter if I had Autopilot on or not. It is supposed to be super-self-driving... it has to count for something.

buffington 5y ago
No it's not. I didn't spend $10k for full self driving. That's not the same feature as Autopilot.

analog31 5y ago

I think that outside of a courtroom, it's possible to recognize "layers" of responsibility, for lack of a better term. I can think of a couple of scenarios: 1. In an industrial plant, equipment needs to be fitted with guards and other protective measures, even if it's arguable that sticking your hand into an exposed rotating mechanism, or grabbing a live electrical circuit, is your fault. If someone's hurt, and there's an investigation, the factory will be cited for not having the proper guards. From what I've read, this is one of the things that we now take for granted, but was hard won through labor activism resulting in a dramatic reduction in workplace deaths. 2. The European approach, where they assign "fault" for a crash, but at the same time investigate how the infrastructure can be redesigned to make the crash less likely. Yes I would hope that a regulatory body investigates the OP's crash. At the same time, I've read some comments in HN that Tesla drivers hover their foot over the accelerator in case of "ghost" braking. Naturally this is anecdotal. Still, the driver could have mistakenly stepped on the wrong pedal.

tiahura 5y ago
VERY generally, in the US, the jury assigns a percentage of fault to each party. E.g., Defendant 1 was 40% at fault, Defendant 2 51%, Defendant 3 5%, and the Plaintiff 4%. Plaintiff can collect 40% of his damages from D1, etc. Some states will allow Plaintiff to collect 96% from D2, and give D2 the right to collect the other defendants' proportionate share from them.

LeifCarrotson 5y ago

That may be the legal reality we live in - it's true that if a driver in a Toyota rear-ended someone else, there would be (and should be) no NTSB/NHTSA safety investigation. The driver was simply at fault, they should be appropriately penalized and will hopefully not do it again. The difference is that safety improvements to Autopilot can scale. Patch the software or upgrade the hardware to fix the root cause of this collision and future collisions can be avoided!