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> Last year, the Department of Justice launched an investigation into Tesla and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) found that 322 fronta

> Last year, the Department of Justice launched an investigation into Tesla and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) found that 322 frontal and other collisions resulted from Autopilot disengaging. As the recall mentioned above highlights, it was too easy for drivers to leave Tesla's Autopilot on its own and completely relinquish control. We need less technical fixes for things like this and more legal consequences for drivers who are found to have used the system negligently. Want to act like a clown in your self-driving Tesla? Great, you're still responsible for what it does and now you can deal with a criminal conviction, same as someone driving drunk.

ceejayoz 3y ago
We threaten people with death or life in prison and they still do things. I'm skeptical of the ability to prevent bad behavior in this fashion - especially when it's a much greyer area of culpability.
onetimeuse92304 3y ago
Who'd have guessed it is hard to safely transition from not driving/inattentive to driving in an instant while in traffic.
hypeatei 3y ago
This is a general problem in the US because we're so dependent on cars. We're very lax on car deaths / injuries caused by negligence. I think the saying goes "If you're going to kill someone, do it in a car"
Xylakant 3y ago
This will not help. Humans are fundamentally incapable of babysitting repeptitive boring tasks that require interaction only in failure cases. Expecting humans to do so is expecting superhuman capabilities and no amount of threatening the drivers with legal consequencces will change the outcome. All you'll achieve is punishing the poor sobs that trusted teslas marketing stunt. If you want this to change, make Tesla liable and they'll quickly fix this, one way or another.
- blueboo 3y ago
  Punishing “poor slobs” is the cornerstone of deterrence for most crimes, why doesn’t it apply here as well?
  - Xylakant 3y ago
    It depends on what you want to achieve. If all you want is revenge, then by all means, punish them as hard as you wish. Make them listen to tesla autopilot advertising until their ears bleed. The harm is done by that time. If you want to avoid harm, then you're well served to take the failure mode into account - it's not a conscious decision to take attention away from the autopilot. It's a fundamental psychological mechanism and we're all prone to fall victim. The only way to avoid the trap is to not use autopilot - or change how it works and adress the need for changes to the party that (mis)designed the feature and has power to change it.
  - taylodl 3y ago
    Humans are fundamentally incapable of babysitting repeptitive boring tasks that require interaction only in failure cases. Read this repeatedly until you've answered your question.
- danudey 3y ago
  Making Tesla criminally liable (in a tangible, punitive sense, not just a $5000 fine per infraction) for every instance of an individual being directly harmed by a Tesla's self-driving mode would be a huge win for society as a whole, but Tesla and their supporters and apologists seem to have this idea that "hey, it's software, it's buggy but we'll fix it and iterate and then it'll be great" without realizing that we're not just crashing and losing the last ten minutes of someone's essay, we're crashing and killing human beings. It would be an uphill battle for sure, and that's incredibly depressing.
  - quonn 3y ago
    The autopilot is adaptive cruise control + lane keeping. It’s abundantly clear and on top of this plenty of other cars have both features. The only difference is that the wheel is kept more steady. Why would you make the manufacturer liable for this?
michael1999 3y ago
That would require a complete revamp of US law and culture. As it is now, you are not a criminal if you stop paying attention and run someone over. Your actions have to rise to a much higher level of wanton criminality before you are ever at risk of a criminal charge. People kill people on sidewalks, in cross-walks, in their living-rooms (!!!) and face nothing more than a $1000 fine for failure to yield. This kind of change isn't impossible. Drunk driving was once in this same category -- I.e. considered an unfortunate accident rather than a crime. Then Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) ran a 30 year campaign to change the law, change enforcement, change prosecution, and finally (partially) the culture. But I guarantee the NHTSA has neither the mandate nor the capacity to lead that change.
- merpnderp 3y ago
  Is this true? I'm pretty sure being caught looking at your phone while running someone over will get you a criminal charge in most states.
  - michael1999 3y ago
    The law might say that (that's step 1 in the culture change). But the police won't arrest. And if the police arrest, the prosecutors won't charge. And if the prosecutors charge, a judge/jury won't convict. Every one of those people along the way think "there, but for the grace of god, go I". They all drive to work, fussing with their phones while doing it, and just can't bring themselves to consider it a crime. It really is very much like drunk driving in that way. https://www.dailynews.com/2014/08/27/no-charges-for-lasd-deputy-who-fatally-struck-cyclist-while-typing-on-computer/ https://www.dailynews.com/2014/08/27/no-charges-for-lasd-dep... https://www.scribd.com/document/237940150/Official-document-Deputy-won-t-be-charged-in-death-of-Calabasas-bicyclist-Milton-Olin https://www.scribd.com/document/237940150/Official-document-...
    - slau 3y ago
      I don’t doubt what you say, but I’m flabbergasted that phone use really is that common. I’ve probably used my phone 5 times while driving in the last two years, and I can’t imagine why anyone would need to do it more than that. I do rely on CarPlay and Siri massively.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
happytiger 3y ago
The only way to change this is to affect corporate shareholders, not punish users. Pushing responsibility onto individual drivers for misusing automated systems is not the answer. Making it painful enough to progress to the technology closer to infallibility is the way forward. As always it comes down to the incentives and desired outcomes argument. We aren’t trying to incentivize good behavior. We are trying to close the distance between technical promise and genuine achievement. You, in general principles, have to build the incentives around negative or positive consequences to manufacturers, not punish technology users for not using the half-ass implementation properly. Top management is almost always most concerned with an innovation’s likely effect on the bottom line and they are accustomed to receiving market feedback, proposals and regulatory guidance that in turn help them prioritize resources to optimize for a return on investment and payback. We want to leverage that decision system to fix self-driving not engage in punitive end-user punishment because end users can’t do anything to change it. TLDR; Right instinct, wrong clowns.
kulahan 3y ago
Then outlaw the system. The entire point of the tech is to make it so I don't HAVE to drive. If I still have to have my hands on the wheel, I still need to be paying so close attention that I can take over in the half a second I get to react, then I'm not actually having anything automated. I'm still driving the car. Either we have to accept these systems, or we need to ban them, but this goofy waffling where we just cripple them to be useless makes no sense to me.
- quonn 3y ago
  The entire point is that you don‘t have to constantly center the car in the lane as well as having it perfectly centered. How is that wrong?
  - Volundr 3y ago
    Serious question... What does this actually free you from? Is the occasional adjustment to keep in your lane that much? It's not like cruise control where after holding my foot in the same position for hours my ankle is damn near locked up, and the occasional adjustment helps keep focus. I just can't figure out what lane centering is supposed to free me up to do instead.
    - _ea1k 3y ago
      I've used pro pilot on a Nissan on the highway, mostly because the steering felt too light otherwise. In general, that analogy applies, though. Just like cruise control allows you to effortless maintain a speed, autosteer makes lane centering effortless. It is basically like power steering that reduces steering effort to exactly zero. The benefit is greater than I thought it'd be, tbh.
    - slau 3y ago
      I just drove 2000km in the last couple days. I have a car with level 2 driver assistance (ADAS). This includes lane assist. I keep my hands on the steering wheel virtually at all times. I say virtually because I might let go for 2-3 seconds to untwist a bottle cap if everyone else in the car is asleep, not any different than the “knee steering” I did before. However, the car follows the curvature of the road without a problem. The main benefit of ADAS, to me, is greatly reduced driver exhaustion. Yes, I am paying attention and actively driving the car, however I can focus on the important things. The ACC ensures I don’t need to worry about fines for speeding due to a heavy foot. It also ensures that I’m “far enough” from the car in front to keep me (and them) safe. Lane assist means I can spend 20% more focus on understanding what shenanigans are going on 5 cars ahead instead of worrying about drifting in another lane. Do I rely on it continuously? Nope. Do I trust it completely? It’s bad enough that I can’t. However, after driving 2000km, I’m still fresh enough to engage in a conversation in a foreign language with the in-laws, whereas in my prime, 15 years ago, the same trip would’ve put me to bed instantly. It reduces the cognitive load of driving. It doesn’t make driving easier, however it reduces the mental burden of being a defensive driver. It’s not unlike ABS. Could I achieve a lower stopping distance by carefully surfing the grip/skid brake pressure? With practice, on a track, absolutely. Do I get greater peace of mind knowing that at any time a computer is checking 500x per second whether my tyres are losing grip, regardless of my state of mind, whether I’m paying attention, am distracted, the road conditions, or which pair of shoes I’m wearing? Undoubtedly.
7e 3y ago
But Tesla sells a system which lulls the human brain into involuntary complacency. A mind cannot babysit a machine. Here, Tesla is the bartender.
aaomidi 3y ago
That’s not really how this works? The biggest reduction in drunk driving happened because of ride sharing. The biggest reduction in piracy was because of availability of legal content. The biggest reduction in car deaths is going to be creating an alternative to cars. Human error is a valid defense because humans make a ton of errors, all the time. I can bet that punishing people for human errors in this context will have a net negative consequence on society as a whole.

ceejayoz 3y ago

We threaten people with death or life in prison and they still do things. I'm skeptical of the ability to prevent bad behavior in this fashion - especially when it's a much greyer area of culpability.

onetimeuse92304 3y ago

Who'd have guessed it is hard to safely transition from not driving/inattentive to driving in an instant while in traffic.

hypeatei 3y ago

This is a general problem in the US because we're so dependent on cars. We're very lax on car deaths / injuries caused by negligence. I think the saying goes "If you're going to kill someone, do it in a car"

Xylakant 3y ago

This will not help. Humans are fundamentally incapable of babysitting repeptitive boring tasks that require interaction only in failure cases. Expecting humans to do so is expecting superhuman capabilities and no amount of threatening the drivers with legal consequencces will change the outcome. All you'll achieve is punishing the poor sobs that trusted teslas marketing stunt. If you want this to change, make Tesla liable and they'll quickly fix this, one way or another.

blueboo 3y ago
Punishing “poor slobs” is the cornerstone of deterrence for most crimes, why doesn’t it apply here as well?
- Xylakant 3y ago
  It depends on what you want to achieve. If all you want is revenge, then by all means, punish them as hard as you wish. Make them listen to tesla autopilot advertising until their ears bleed. The harm is done by that time. If you want to avoid harm, then you're well served to take the failure mode into account - it's not a conscious decision to take attention away from the autopilot. It's a fundamental psychological mechanism and we're all prone to fall victim. The only way to avoid the trap is to not use autopilot - or change how it works and adress the need for changes to the party that (mis)designed the feature and has power to change it.
- taylodl 3y ago
  Humans are fundamentally incapable of babysitting repeptitive boring tasks that require interaction only in failure cases. Read this repeatedly until you've answered your question.
danudey 3y ago
Making Tesla criminally liable (in a tangible, punitive sense, not just a $5000 fine per infraction) for every instance of an individual being directly harmed by a Tesla's self-driving mode would be a huge win for society as a whole, but Tesla and their supporters and apologists seem to have this idea that "hey, it's software, it's buggy but we'll fix it and iterate and then it'll be great" without realizing that we're not just crashing and losing the last ten minutes of someone's essay, we're crashing and killing human beings. It would be an uphill battle for sure, and that's incredibly depressing.
- quonn 3y ago
  The autopilot is adaptive cruise control + lane keeping. It’s abundantly clear and on top of this plenty of other cars have both features. The only difference is that the wheel is kept more steady. Why would you make the manufacturer liable for this?

michael1999 3y ago

That would require a complete revamp of US law and culture. As it is now, you are not a criminal if you stop paying attention and run someone over. Your actions have to rise to a much higher level of wanton criminality before you are ever at risk of a criminal charge. People kill people on sidewalks, in cross-walks, in their living-rooms (!!!) and face nothing more than a $1000 fine for failure to yield. This kind of change isn't impossible. Drunk driving was once in this same category -- I.e. considered an unfortunate accident rather than a crime. Then Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) ran a 30 year campaign to change the law, change enforcement, change prosecution, and finally (partially) the culture. But I guarantee the NHTSA has neither the mandate nor the capacity to lead that change.

merpnderp 3y ago
Is this true? I'm pretty sure being caught looking at your phone while running someone over will get you a criminal charge in most states.
- michael1999 3y ago
  The law might say that (that's step 1 in the culture change). But the police won't arrest. And if the police arrest, the prosecutors won't charge. And if the prosecutors charge, a judge/jury won't convict. Every one of those people along the way think "there, but for the grace of god, go I". They all drive to work, fussing with their phones while doing it, and just can't bring themselves to consider it a crime. It really is very much like drunk driving in that way. https://www.dailynews.com/2014/08/27/no-charges-for-lasd-deputy-who-fatally-struck-cyclist-while-typing-on-computer/ https://www.dailynews.com/2014/08/27/no-charges-for-lasd-dep... https://www.scribd.com/document/237940150/Official-document-Deputy-won-t-be-charged-in-death-of-Calabasas-bicyclist-Milton-Olin https://www.scribd.com/document/237940150/Official-document-...
  - slau 3y ago
    I don’t doubt what you say, but I’m flabbergasted that phone use really is that common. I’ve probably used my phone 5 times while driving in the last two years, and I can’t imagine why anyone would need to do it more than that. I do rely on CarPlay and Siri massively.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

happytiger 3y ago

The only way to change this is to affect corporate shareholders, not punish users. Pushing responsibility onto individual drivers for misusing automated systems is not the answer. Making it painful enough to progress to the technology closer to infallibility is the way forward. As always it comes down to the incentives and desired outcomes argument. We aren’t trying to incentivize good behavior. We are trying to close the distance between technical promise and genuine achievement. You, in general principles, have to build the incentives around negative or positive consequences to manufacturers, not punish technology users for not using the half-ass implementation properly. Top management is almost always most concerned with an innovation’s likely effect on the bottom line and they are accustomed to receiving market feedback, proposals and regulatory guidance that in turn help them prioritize resources to optimize for a return on investment and payback. We want to leverage that decision system to fix self-driving not engage in punitive end-user punishment because end users can’t do anything to change it. TLDR; Right instinct, wrong clowns.

kulahan 3y ago

Then outlaw the system. The entire point of the tech is to make it so I don't HAVE to drive. If I still have to have my hands on the wheel, I still need to be paying so close attention that I can take over in the half a second I get to react, then I'm not actually having anything automated. I'm still driving the car. Either we have to accept these systems, or we need to ban them, but this goofy waffling where we just cripple them to be useless makes no sense to me.

quonn 3y ago
The entire point is that you don‘t have to constantly center the car in the lane as well as having it perfectly centered. How is that wrong?
- Volundr 3y ago
  Serious question... What does this actually free you from? Is the occasional adjustment to keep in your lane that much? It's not like cruise control where after holding my foot in the same position for hours my ankle is damn near locked up, and the occasional adjustment helps keep focus. I just can't figure out what lane centering is supposed to free me up to do instead.
  - _ea1k 3y ago
    I've used pro pilot on a Nissan on the highway, mostly because the steering felt too light otherwise. In general, that analogy applies, though. Just like cruise control allows you to effortless maintain a speed, autosteer makes lane centering effortless. It is basically like power steering that reduces steering effort to exactly zero. The benefit is greater than I thought it'd be, tbh.
  - slau 3y ago
    I just drove 2000km in the last couple days. I have a car with level 2 driver assistance (ADAS). This includes lane assist. I keep my hands on the steering wheel virtually at all times. I say virtually because I might let go for 2-3 seconds to untwist a bottle cap if everyone else in the car is asleep, not any different than the “knee steering” I did before. However, the car follows the curvature of the road without a problem. The main benefit of ADAS, to me, is greatly reduced driver exhaustion. Yes, I am paying attention and actively driving the car, however I can focus on the important things. The ACC ensures I don’t need to worry about fines for speeding due to a heavy foot. It also ensures that I’m “far enough” from the car in front to keep me (and them) safe. Lane assist means I can spend 20% more focus on understanding what shenanigans are going on 5 cars ahead instead of worrying about drifting in another lane. Do I rely on it continuously? Nope. Do I trust it completely? It’s bad enough that I can’t. However, after driving 2000km, I’m still fresh enough to engage in a conversation in a foreign language with the in-laws, whereas in my prime, 15 years ago, the same trip would’ve put me to bed instantly. It reduces the cognitive load of driving. It doesn’t make driving easier, however it reduces the mental burden of being a defensive driver. It’s not unlike ABS. Could I achieve a lower stopping distance by carefully surfing the grip/skid brake pressure? With practice, on a track, absolutely. Do I get greater peace of mind knowing that at any time a computer is checking 500x per second whether my tyres are losing grip, regardless of my state of mind, whether I’m paying attention, am distracted, the road conditions, or which pair of shoes I’m wearing? Undoubtedly.

7e 3y ago

But Tesla sells a system which lulls the human brain into involuntary complacency. A mind cannot babysit a machine. Here, Tesla is the bartender.

aaomidi 3y ago

That’s not really how this works? The biggest reduction in drunk driving happened because of ride sharing. The biggest reduction in piracy was because of availability of legal content. The biggest reduction in car deaths is going to be creating an alternative to cars. Human error is a valid defense because humans make a ton of errors, all the time. I can bet that punishing people for human errors in this context will have a net negative consequence on society as a whole.