16 ms·

few things inspire confidence like companies putting their literal money where their mouth is

slg 4y ago
But haven't we all seen Fight Club? It isn't a question a confidence, it is a question of financial math. This decision tells us nothing about the safety of the Mercedes system compared to its competitors. All it tells us is that adding these limitations to ensure the system is only used in the safest possible scenarios makes taking over liability more reasonable. That isn't surprising. Their competitors' systems are also very safe if used in this manner. The only difference is that the competitors are not satisfied with releasing a system with enough limitations that it only works in stop-and-go highway traffic in clear weather. It is that added functionality that is more dangerous and the reason other manufacturers don't take on liability. Odds are the marketing and accounting wings of Mercedes had just as much if not more influence on this decision than the tech team.
- I_DRINK_KOOLAID 4y ago
  > This decision tells us nothing about the safety of the Mercedes system compared to its competitors Mercedes is just taking notice that grandstanding and PR worked for Tesla, so they are doing the same thing. Everybody who is serious about this knows that unless you get Level 5 it's all just grandstanding. Level 5 won't come from unleashing Level 3 into the world and throwing deers , cyclists and pedestrians at it (hopefully not literally). It's just a weird hill that brainpower and capital decided to die on. Deaths on the road are tragic but airbags, seatbelts and ultimately bigger cars and lower alcohol intake are something that is practical, whereas FSD is something like a pie-in-the-sky thing
  - upbeat_general 4y ago
    I don't know how you came to this conclusion. Level 4 is a serious goal that provides very useful benefits.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    Bigger cars? Have you seen the new pickups, what do you want to drive, a tank? Also bigger cars kill more pedestrians
    - HWR_14 4y ago
      People who say "bigger cars are safer" mean "the person driving the bigger car is safer". It's an arms race to them and they want the bigger car.
      - I_DRINK_KOOLAID 4y ago
        Not all crashes involve multiple cars. Bigger cars reduce the amount of deaths because there is more metal mass between you and the tree/barrier that you hit. I also said that bigger cars is just one element in the equation, with seatbelt compliance, zero alcohol tolerance, airbags etc. All those things are much more feasible and practical solutions compared to pie-in-the-sky FSD
        yywwbbn 4y ago
        US and Germany might be at different stages of this process, though. For example Germany has almost 2x less deaths per km driven and the situation is even better in countries like Switzerland or Norway. Also we’re talking about the perspective of the car manufacturer. New cars are already significantly safer than an average car on the road so it’s relatively little they can do to address many of the points since there seems to bet not so much room left for non marginal improvements in safety and FSD is a much more attractive proposition to most car buyers than “3.5% safer than the competing brand”.
        I_DRINK_KOOLAID 4y ago
        > FSD is a much more attractive proposition to most car buyers So is donating to the church hoping to secure a place in Heaven. We all fool ourselves for the sake of peace of mind or immediate gratification, the important thing is to be aware of it. It's important to be honest with yourself and decide who are the people who can take you for a ride. For me it's my younger siblings, the sport franchises I support, and attractive women. Because at least in such circumstances it would be a fun and worthy ride. Being taken for a ride by Musk, Mary Barra, Herbert Diess, (insert automotive CEO), or even Elizabeth Holmes, Bernie Madoff...that's pathetic, not fun and will leave you with regrets...but maybe techno-utopianists have a different mindset and their calculus is the opposite of mine, meaning they have a contempt for the small things in life and only get excited about moonshots and pie-in-the-sky ideas even if it means getting scammed.
- moralestapia 4y ago
  >But haven't we all seen Fight Club? ???
  - thematrixturtle 4y ago
    http://inaneexplained.blogspot.com/2011/03/fight-club-car-recall.html http://inaneexplained.blogspot.com/2011/03/fight-club-car-re... TL;DR; If there's a defect that kills or maims people, car manufacturers compute if it's cheaper to recall or just deal with the lawsuits. And this happens regularly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed
    - idoh 4y ago
      There's always a tradeoff between cost and safety, how else would you imagine this to work?
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - autoexec 4y ago
        Maybe cars with known technical/mechanical defects that will result in death could be recalled even in cases where it eats a bit more into the profits of the auto manufacturer than it would if they just paid settlements to the families who lost loved ones. That seems like a pretty good way to imagine this to work.
      - TheDong 4y ago
        The proposed alternative, I think, is that the car company values a customer's life at more than the expected cost of settling. The cost of settling is supposed to approximate the value of a human life, but it sounds pretty bad to say "yeah, we knew this defect would cost $50MM to fix, but we estimated only 5 people would die, and each person's life is worth less than $10MM because the settlement is only like $400k per life". The proposed alternative is that the car company has to say "We calculated this defect will probably kill 5 people, so we will spend any amount of money to fix it, up to and including us having no profit"
- kevinventullo 4y ago
  It’s both, right? The competitors may very well be just as safe in those conditions, but we wouldn’t know based on their liability stance; the Fight Club equation simply doesn’t apply. With Mercedes, the Fight Club equation gives something like a mathematical guarantee of their estimated confidence of the safety of the system. There are no mathematical guarantees from the competitors.
  - slg 4y ago
    >It’s both, right? The competitors may very well be just as safe in those conditions, but we wouldn’t know based on their liability stance; the Fight Club equation simply doesn’t apply. I was referencing Fight Club as an example of an auto manufacturer making a life and death decision based off their financial incentives and not the best interest of the customer. The decision to take on liability is about money, not confidence in safety. >With Mercedes, the Fight Club equation gives something like a mathematical guarantee of their estimated confidence of the safety of the system. There are no mathematical guarantees from the competitors. You also have to factor in the marketing aspects. I'll reference another movie here in Tommy Boy[1]. Mercedes knows a move like this is attractive to consumers. People will look at it and think it means the system is safer. This decision will sell cars. But a guarantee doesn't tell you anything about the quality of the product. As Chris Farley's character says, you can "take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed". Maybe the system is truly dangerous and taking on this liability would be a losing proposition alone, yet adding in these additional sales from the marketing of this liability coverage yields a net positive for the decision. Or maybe the system truly is incredibly safe. There is no way for us to know. I am simply pointing out that this decision about liability is largely meaningless when judging safety because safety is only one of numerous criteria used to make the decision. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEB7WbTTlu4&t=49s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEB7WbTTlu4&t=49s
    - refulgentis 4y ago
      > I was referencing Fight Club as an example of an auto manufacturer making a life and death decision based off their financial incentives and not the best interest of the customer. The decision to take on liability is about money, not confidence in safety. The Fight Club scene is about how these two things are integrated: their confidence in safety defines their ability to choose to take on liability. Yes, its intent in the story is to horrify: there's a lack of humanity, a reliance on a simple function relating those two variables. However, that doesn't imply the two variables are unrelated, in fact, it implies they are completely correlated.
- coredog64 4y ago
  The “Fight Club” math is incomplete for the sake of a good story. Regulators can force a recall on manufacturers and insurance companies can make a car uneconomical to buyers by appropriately pricing in risk. You may argue that the former has been undone by regulatory capture (something I would dispute), but I think we all recognize that insurance companies aren’t particularly charitable.
  - slg 4y ago
    Wouldn’t this logic suggest that the economic value of taking on this liability is minimal considering insurers haven’t made cars with competing tech unaffordable for buyers to insure?
  - hedora 4y ago
    The Fight Club math is complete. They specifically quote the cost of out of court settlements, implying hush money. This has been done successfully before. One model of elevators used to turn kids into ground beef (under a dozen a year -- the gap between the inner and outer door was too big). Eventually they were almost all replaced, the deaths tapered off and everyone involved retired. One year, much later, one of the few left in service killed a kid. No one working at the elevator company knew what was going on, and all hell broke loose. The remaining surviving culprit was in an old folks home at that point. The company ended up recalling something like two or three antique elevators.
- drooogs 4y ago
  I don't really see what it has to do with fight club. suppose car A and car B have autonomous driving that perform identically across a wide range of conditions. the manufacturer A enables FSD whenever the customer feels like it, but accepts no liability. manufacturer B accepts full liability for FSD use, but restricts it to situations where that's a good bet. car B is safer for the average customer, because it doesn't let them use FSD when it is especially risky. unless I understood a lot more about ML, CV, etc, I would pick car B every time.
  - zaroth 4y ago
    No, this reasoning is flawed. The baseline safety of cars is an absolute shit show. 30,000 people dying every year and trillion dollars of damages and lost productivity. Car A can enable FSD in all cases, be safer in all cases, but still not be a good deal economically for the manufacturer to accept liability. Car B could be making drivers less safe overall by preventing them from enabling FSD in most cases, but at least they aren’t liable.
    - jhugo 4y ago
      Your comment is predicated on the assumption that FSD (the actual system installed in the car, not a future theoretical perfect system) is safer than the average driver in the situations where Mercedes currently disables it. I'm not sure we have data to support that? We know Tesla's autopilot is safer on average, but most of those miles will have been driven in the situations where Mercedes allows it to be used.
      - zaroth 4y ago
        I am saying such a scenario may possibly exist, not necessarily that it does exist. Mercedes could be increasing the number of overall deaths by limiting the availability of the feature and still be reducing their liability for when the system is in use. Let’s say with FSD on all the time that instead of 30,000 people a year dying that only 20,000 people a year die. Would a company accept the liability? What if the death rate was 10,000? 1,000? 100? If FSD could prevent 29,900 deaths a year but still see deadly failures 100 times a year, would a company say “I accept the liability”? So you see, perhaps it’s crucial that companies not be able to be sued out of existence even if a few hundred people a year are dying in exceptional cases under their software, in order to prevent over a quarter million deaths and untold number of maimings every decade. Also consider in this ethical and legal liability dilemma that these populations are not necessarily subsets, but could be disjoint populations.
vincentmarle 4y ago
I feel strangely assured to know that Mercedes Benz will be paying thru their nose when I’m dead

slg 4y ago

But haven't we all seen Fight Club? It isn't a question a confidence, it is a question of financial math. This decision tells us nothing about the safety of the Mercedes system compared to its competitors. All it tells us is that adding these limitations to ensure the system is only used in the safest possible scenarios makes taking over liability more reasonable. That isn't surprising. Their competitors' systems are also very safe if used in this manner. The only difference is that the competitors are not satisfied with releasing a system with enough limitations that it only works in stop-and-go highway traffic in clear weather. It is that added functionality that is more dangerous and the reason other manufacturers don't take on liability. Odds are the marketing and accounting wings of Mercedes had just as much if not more influence on this decision than the tech team.

I_DRINK_KOOLAID 4y ago
> This decision tells us nothing about the safety of the Mercedes system compared to its competitors Mercedes is just taking notice that grandstanding and PR worked for Tesla, so they are doing the same thing. Everybody who is serious about this knows that unless you get Level 5 it's all just grandstanding. Level 5 won't come from unleashing Level 3 into the world and throwing deers , cyclists and pedestrians at it (hopefully not literally). It's just a weird hill that brainpower and capital decided to die on. Deaths on the road are tragic but airbags, seatbelts and ultimately bigger cars and lower alcohol intake are something that is practical, whereas FSD is something like a pie-in-the-sky thing
- upbeat_general 4y ago
  I don't know how you came to this conclusion. Level 4 is a serious goal that provides very useful benefits.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  Bigger cars? Have you seen the new pickups, what do you want to drive, a tank? Also bigger cars kill more pedestrians
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    People who say "bigger cars are safer" mean "the person driving the bigger car is safer". It's an arms race to them and they want the bigger car.
    - I_DRINK_KOOLAID 4y ago
      Not all crashes involve multiple cars. Bigger cars reduce the amount of deaths because there is more metal mass between you and the tree/barrier that you hit. I also said that bigger cars is just one element in the equation, with seatbelt compliance, zero alcohol tolerance, airbags etc. All those things are much more feasible and practical solutions compared to pie-in-the-sky FSD
      - yywwbbn 4y ago
        US and Germany might be at different stages of this process, though. For example Germany has almost 2x less deaths per km driven and the situation is even better in countries like Switzerland or Norway. Also we’re talking about the perspective of the car manufacturer. New cars are already significantly safer than an average car on the road so it’s relatively little they can do to address many of the points since there seems to bet not so much room left for non marginal improvements in safety and FSD is a much more attractive proposition to most car buyers than “3.5% safer than the competing brand”.
        I_DRINK_KOOLAID 4y ago
        > FSD is a much more attractive proposition to most car buyers So is donating to the church hoping to secure a place in Heaven. We all fool ourselves for the sake of peace of mind or immediate gratification, the important thing is to be aware of it. It's important to be honest with yourself and decide who are the people who can take you for a ride. For me it's my younger siblings, the sport franchises I support, and attractive women. Because at least in such circumstances it would be a fun and worthy ride. Being taken for a ride by Musk, Mary Barra, Herbert Diess, (insert automotive CEO), or even Elizabeth Holmes, Bernie Madoff...that's pathetic, not fun and will leave you with regrets...but maybe techno-utopianists have a different mindset and their calculus is the opposite of mine, meaning they have a contempt for the small things in life and only get excited about moonshots and pie-in-the-sky ideas even if it means getting scammed.
moralestapia 4y ago
>But haven't we all seen Fight Club? ???
- thematrixturtle 4y ago
  http://inaneexplained.blogspot.com/2011/03/fight-club-car-recall.html http://inaneexplained.blogspot.com/2011/03/fight-club-car-re... TL;DR; If there's a defect that kills or maims people, car manufacturers compute if it's cheaper to recall or just deal with the lawsuits. And this happens regularly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed
  - idoh 4y ago
    There's always a tradeoff between cost and safety, how else would you imagine this to work?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - autoexec 4y ago
      Maybe cars with known technical/mechanical defects that will result in death could be recalled even in cases where it eats a bit more into the profits of the auto manufacturer than it would if they just paid settlements to the families who lost loved ones. That seems like a pretty good way to imagine this to work.
    - TheDong 4y ago
      The proposed alternative, I think, is that the car company values a customer's life at more than the expected cost of settling. The cost of settling is supposed to approximate the value of a human life, but it sounds pretty bad to say "yeah, we knew this defect would cost $50MM to fix, but we estimated only 5 people would die, and each person's life is worth less than $10MM because the settlement is only like $400k per life". The proposed alternative is that the car company has to say "We calculated this defect will probably kill 5 people, so we will spend any amount of money to fix it, up to and including us having no profit"
kevinventullo 4y ago
It’s both, right? The competitors may very well be just as safe in those conditions, but we wouldn’t know based on their liability stance; the Fight Club equation simply doesn’t apply. With Mercedes, the Fight Club equation gives something like a mathematical guarantee of their estimated confidence of the safety of the system. There are no mathematical guarantees from the competitors.
- slg 4y ago
  >It’s both, right? The competitors may very well be just as safe in those conditions, but we wouldn’t know based on their liability stance; the Fight Club equation simply doesn’t apply. I was referencing Fight Club as an example of an auto manufacturer making a life and death decision based off their financial incentives and not the best interest of the customer. The decision to take on liability is about money, not confidence in safety. >With Mercedes, the Fight Club equation gives something like a mathematical guarantee of their estimated confidence of the safety of the system. There are no mathematical guarantees from the competitors. You also have to factor in the marketing aspects. I'll reference another movie here in Tommy Boy[1]. Mercedes knows a move like this is attractive to consumers. People will look at it and think it means the system is safer. This decision will sell cars. But a guarantee doesn't tell you anything about the quality of the product. As Chris Farley's character says, you can "take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed". Maybe the system is truly dangerous and taking on this liability would be a losing proposition alone, yet adding in these additional sales from the marketing of this liability coverage yields a net positive for the decision. Or maybe the system truly is incredibly safe. There is no way for us to know. I am simply pointing out that this decision about liability is largely meaningless when judging safety because safety is only one of numerous criteria used to make the decision. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEB7WbTTlu4&t=49s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEB7WbTTlu4&t=49s
  - refulgentis 4y ago
    > I was referencing Fight Club as an example of an auto manufacturer making a life and death decision based off their financial incentives and not the best interest of the customer. The decision to take on liability is about money, not confidence in safety. The Fight Club scene is about how these two things are integrated: their confidence in safety defines their ability to choose to take on liability. Yes, its intent in the story is to horrify: there's a lack of humanity, a reliance on a simple function relating those two variables. However, that doesn't imply the two variables are unrelated, in fact, it implies they are completely correlated.
coredog64 4y ago
The “Fight Club” math is incomplete for the sake of a good story. Regulators can force a recall on manufacturers and insurance companies can make a car uneconomical to buyers by appropriately pricing in risk. You may argue that the former has been undone by regulatory capture (something I would dispute), but I think we all recognize that insurance companies aren’t particularly charitable.
- slg 4y ago
  Wouldn’t this logic suggest that the economic value of taking on this liability is minimal considering insurers haven’t made cars with competing tech unaffordable for buyers to insure?
- hedora 4y ago
  The Fight Club math is complete. They specifically quote the cost of out of court settlements, implying hush money. This has been done successfully before. One model of elevators used to turn kids into ground beef (under a dozen a year -- the gap between the inner and outer door was too big). Eventually they were almost all replaced, the deaths tapered off and everyone involved retired. One year, much later, one of the few left in service killed a kid. No one working at the elevator company knew what was going on, and all hell broke loose. The remaining surviving culprit was in an old folks home at that point. The company ended up recalling something like two or three antique elevators.
drooogs 4y ago
I don't really see what it has to do with fight club. suppose car A and car B have autonomous driving that perform identically across a wide range of conditions. the manufacturer A enables FSD whenever the customer feels like it, but accepts no liability. manufacturer B accepts full liability for FSD use, but restricts it to situations where that's a good bet. car B is safer for the average customer, because it doesn't let them use FSD when it is especially risky. unless I understood a lot more about ML, CV, etc, I would pick car B every time.
- zaroth 4y ago
  No, this reasoning is flawed. The baseline safety of cars is an absolute shit show. 30,000 people dying every year and trillion dollars of damages and lost productivity. Car A can enable FSD in all cases, be safer in all cases, but still not be a good deal economically for the manufacturer to accept liability. Car B could be making drivers less safe overall by preventing them from enabling FSD in most cases, but at least they aren’t liable.
  - jhugo 4y ago
    Your comment is predicated on the assumption that FSD (the actual system installed in the car, not a future theoretical perfect system) is safer than the average driver in the situations where Mercedes currently disables it. I'm not sure we have data to support that? We know Tesla's autopilot is safer on average, but most of those miles will have been driven in the situations where Mercedes allows it to be used.
    - zaroth 4y ago
      I am saying such a scenario may possibly exist, not necessarily that it does exist. Mercedes could be increasing the number of overall deaths by limiting the availability of the feature and still be reducing their liability for when the system is in use. Let’s say with FSD on all the time that instead of 30,000 people a year dying that only 20,000 people a year die. Would a company accept the liability? What if the death rate was 10,000? 1,000? 100? If FSD could prevent 29,900 deaths a year but still see deadly failures 100 times a year, would a company say “I accept the liability”? So you see, perhaps it’s crucial that companies not be able to be sued out of existence even if a few hundred people a year are dying in exceptional cases under their software, in order to prevent over a quarter million deaths and untold number of maimings every decade. Also consider in this ethical and legal liability dilemma that these populations are not necessarily subsets, but could be disjoint populations.

vincentmarle 4y ago

I feel strangely assured to know that Mercedes Benz will be paying thru their nose when I’m dead