6 ms·

Tesla driver arrested for homicide after running over motorcyclist on Autopilot

97 points by brohee 2y ago

oneonone 2y ago
[flagged]
- jolmg 2y ago
  For?
  - sgerenser 2y ago
    Articles that appear to be negative on Tesla or Elon Musk usually get flagged to oblivion.
    - somenameforme 2y ago
      IME it seems to be primarily ones that are just absurdly biased. This story seems extremely relevant, and also sets the stage for an important question to be answered that could have implications even beyond self driving.
  - the_duke 2y ago
    Negative Tesla posts often get flagged immediately, probably by a bunch of dedicated Tesla fans/employees trying to surpress it.
    - lolinder 2y ago
      I'm a huge Tesla skeptic, but Tesla and Musk are lightning rods for tabloid-style garbage that doesn't belong on HN, so it doesn't surprise me that we often see negative Tesla content flagged to death. Meanwhile we also see plenty of content that hits the front page and stays there [0]. Do you have examples of professional, interesting Tesla content that got flagged? [0] More than half of the past year's most popular Tesla articles were negative: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=true&query=Tesla&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    It hasn't been flagged (and I haven't). Elon bashing may be fun, it's rarely productive conversation. And when it isn't productive it should be flagged and often is.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
ado__dev 2y ago
Drivers fault 100%. But Tesla is not blameless with their marketing "Autopilot", "Full self driving", blah blah, giving people a false sense of security. I can't think of a worse problem to try and solve with AI. GPT hallucinates and gives a wrong fact. No biggie, but annoying. Tesla FSD hallucinates and runs over a child, a biggie.
- GGO 2y ago
  Exactly. Tesla shares responsibility for marketing something deceptively that can cause serious incidents. We require toy manufacturers to put clear labels that the toy is not appropriate for certain ages, but allow Tesla to market something as dangerous as Autopilot and FSD, implying that the user is not needed.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > Tesla shares responsibility for marketing something deceptively that can cause serious incidents The driver is criminally liable to the estate of the young man he killed. Tesla may be liable for money damages to the driver they misled. (Maybe the estate also has a civil claim on Tesla if they can show its marketing was grossly negligent.)
    - abduhl 2y ago
      Why are you so sure that criminal liability ends with the driver? Washington’s first degree manslaughter law requires “recklessly caus[ing] the death of another person.” Second degree requires merely causing the death of another person “with criminal negligence.” Criminal negligence requires Tesla to “fail to be aware of a substantial risk that a wrongful act may occur” and that this failure be “a gross deviation from the standard of care that a reasonable person would exercise in the same situation.” It’s certainly not hard to make the case for either, especially given Tesla’s apparent inaction after a number of people have died while Autopilot is active and a number of accidents have occurred while Autopilot is active. Cf the Crumbleys: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68223118 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68223118 Also a pedantic point: the driver is civilly liable to the estate. Criminal charges (and hence criminal liability) can only be brought by the state.
mattbillenstein 2y ago
Elon's refusal to adopt lidar - statistically probably fine, anecdotally it could turn out very badly for any one person which is a hard thing to swallow if it's you...
- Hamuko 2y ago
  Tesla's direction on sensors seems quite ass backwards to me. Didn't they even get rid of parking sensors and replace them with AI vision?
  - mattbillenstein 2y ago
    It makes a lot of sense if you're trying to churn out more profit per unit - less costs - they're at the mercy of a sour market atm on the other side of it.
    - frognumber 2y ago
      Honestly, I'd love for Tesla to be civilly liable here, and not the driver. That aligns incentives correctly. Without that, there is every incentive to market "full self-driving," while investing in a system with the intelligence of a trained parrot. As much as it's absolutely the driver's fault, it's also an inevitable accident. Wrongful death is about $500k-$1M (but should be higher). Tesla market cap is $500B. Damages for O(one million people) are equal to Tesla's market cap, so this is not even bad for business; it's simply factoring in externalities into the cost of doing business. A good split might be criminal system for the driver (which ranges from fines to prison time, and is designed to be punitive), and civil system for Tesla (which is only financial, but designed to cover the financial cost of the death to the family).
      - londons_explore 2y ago
        A big bad news headline alone is worth -$1M to tesla. I really wish every single death ended up splitting a fine amongst all companies even tangentially involved. Grandma fell down the stairs and died? Well fine the architect who designed those stairs, and the builder who built them. Sure, all those companies will pass the cost back to the consumer, but the government will pass the fine revenue back to the consumer in the form of reduced taxes. Ends up net zero overall, but everyone now has a real incentive to look out for the health and safety of others.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
GreedIsGood 2y ago
Is this worse than humans? (edit) I see that the article included that FSD is 5x safer than humans, which may be valid. The article then said : "However, the only reason it is safer than the US average is that it is supervised by drivers who ideally pay extra attention when using FSD." I am positive that they had zero data to back that assertion.
- AlexandrB 2y ago
  Historically these kinds of assertions have been quite misleading. If FSD is mostly used on highways and other "low complexity" environments and then you compare that to human collision rates in all environments, of course FSD will be "safer". Especially if you're measuring collisions/mile vs collisions/hour. Then there are other confounding factors like how Teslas are: * Generally newer than average. * Generally owned by more affluent drivers than average. * Probably used predominantly in urban areas instead of rural ones (to be clear this might unfairly tilt the stats against Tesla thanks to the highway thing). I'm not sure I've seen a good "apples to apples" comparison on this that corrects for these confounding factors.
- deely3 2y ago
  Do you agree that without "autopilot" this incident would not have happened?
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    I don't think there's any way of knowing that for sure. People look at their phones while driving with and without autopilot.
    - deely3 2y ago
      What about this current incident? In your opinion?
      - ceejayoz 2y ago
        Barring a time machine, we've very little way to know when it comes to one specific incident. Again, people distracted by their cell phones kill people on a very regular basis in vehicles without autopilot. If we had better aggregate stats we could compute the statistical likelihood of it, but this stuff isn't tracked anywhere near as closely or completely as, say, aircraft accidents. I don't trust Tesla's self-reported cherry-picked stats.
frognumber 2y ago
I'd rather the article was more precisely titled "manslaughter" rather than "homicide." As much as in legal jargon, homicide encompasses manslaughter, murder, and a few other things, to many people, homicide is synonymous with murder.
- fasthands9 2y ago
  I was confused by this too. In the article they do clarify it is "vehicular homicide" which is the same thing as "vehicular manslaughter" legally. A very serious crime, though often times people walk away with this with little or no jail time.
  - frognumber 2y ago
    It's not an unreasonable outcome. The goal of the criminal system is to reduce crime, not random vengeance. I can certainly think of a time when I was driving when I missed another car in my blind spot and almost caused an accident, or when I saw someone in a car distracted by a toddler, or similar. Those didn't lead to accidents, but they might have if someone were less lucky. There's a range of ways a car can kill people, ranging from driving through a red light at 100MPH, to an illegal U-turn, to making a stupid mistake, to a completely random fluke of circumstance. On one end of the spectrum, there should be prison time, and regardless of whether an accident happens. On the other end, insurance should pay damages, but I'm not sure what good the criminal system can do in terms of deterrence. If a driver is already doing their best to be safe, but slips up, or even isn't doing their best but isn't being unreasonable, criminal penalties don't seem like the right outcome.
- spicybbq 2y ago
  Journalists normally report the charge as written in court documents. Washington state appears to have "vehicular homicide" defined as a specific offense, but not "vehicular manslaughter". It would not be more precise to report an incorrect name for the charged offense.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tromp 2y ago
FSD == Fool Self Driving
jupp0r 2y ago
Independent of the incident itself, the article made it sound like the driver would have benefited from hiring a lawyer before making statements to police.
- londons_explore 2y ago
  Sounds like he passed the breathalyzer, yet still admitted to 'having a drink' before driving... What a fool...
  - AlexandrB 2y ago
    If he's under the legal limit, does it matter if he had a drink?
    - stephendause 2y ago
      Yes. You can be judged to be intoxicated even if you are under the limit.
kibitzor 2y ago
Related video "Tesla Autopilot Crashes into Motorcycle Riders - Why?"[0], summarized to: vision used by Tesla seems to process motorcycles differently, and may be incorrectly "assuming" the closer spaced brake lights on a motorcycle is actually a far away car. More details on the homicide here[1], which shows the crash happened during daylight hours and the bike resembles a sport bike. This is a different condition than my referenced video (night collisions with cruiser-style motorcycles), but I suspect similar incorrect assumptions by Tesla vision happened. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRdzIs4FJJg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRdzIs4FJJg [1] https://www.king5.com/article/traffic/traffic-news/tesla-on-auto-pilot-fatal-crash-motorcycle-snohomish-county-driver-says/281-52ae57e6-4950-4d4d-bbe6-7b2f6dbba5d4 https://www.king5.com/article/traffic/traffic-news/tesla-on-...
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  Another theory I've heard is that the driver was holding down the accelerator to prevent phantom braking. If this is true Tesla will likely respond fairly quickly to prove it wasn't them. So the longer they don't the less likely this theory is.
  - AlexandrB 2y ago
    > Another theory I've heard is that the driver was holding down the accelerator to prevent phantom braking. Would be interesting to know how commonly this workaround is applied by Tesla owners. If this is common enough it seems like a case where a feature that's merely unreliable becomes a safety issue due to second-order effects. Echoes of Therac 25[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
- lamontcg 2y ago
  Keep in mind that so far we only have the driver's assertion that they were using Autopilot at the time. The driver may be attempting to shift blame.
lnsru 2y ago
Brand new Model Y with latest software did 4 really dangerous phantom braking stunts. I engaged the system 5 times in total. It’s called enhanced autopilot. I can’t understand how people trust this kind of systems with their lives. Maybe in USA it works much better than elsewhere. But I will never ever turn it again. For the record I didn’t bought it. Got 3 months trial for using referral link.
molticrystal 2y ago
There have been various discussion over the years of adopting and modernizing the model of Equine law , which dealt with injuries from horse & carriages another type of autonomous / semi-automnomous vehicles. In this case in resolving do the people behind the vehicle share some of the blame. An excerpt from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rahulrazdan/2020/01/07/horses-equine-law-and-the-future-of-the-autonomous-vehicle-legal-framework/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/rahulrazdan/2020/01/07/horses-e... >How does the legal system adapt to new technologies? Generally, this is done by constructing new legal theories that should not conflict with older models and also have characteristics of stability and rationality. What might be the potential legal theories for Autonomous Vehicles? Here are the current candidates: >Negligence: Today, a typical example includes impaired driving. An impaired AV? >Negligent Entrustment of Vehicles: Here the driver was negligent, but the owner is liable because they should not have trusted the driver. Can you be found negligent if you trust your Tesla AutoDrive? >Res Ipsa Loquitur: In this theory, (“the thing that speaks for itself”) the accident would not have occurred if not for some action from the plaintiff. By applying this logic, the plaintiff caused the accident because they became startled by an AV homing features because it was surprising. >Product Liability and Warranty: Are there implied warranties associated when you buy an AV? Can it be proven that some AV vendors are safer than others? If so, do all AV vendors have to come to some standard ? >At this point, it is not clear which theory may apply. However, we may gain insight from a very old body of law — Equine Law. Horses were the original autonomous vehicles and for many centuries, the court system had to deal with horse-related accidents. And while probably not applicable a guy texting, an earlier paper from 2012 which explores an interesting aspect about horses in a frightened state which is akin to the vehicle making its own decision in a crisis scenario: "Of Frightened Horses and Autonomous Vehicles: Tort Law and its Assimilation of Innovations" https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1170&context=facpubs https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...

97 points by brohee 2y ago

oneonone 2y ago

[flagged]

jolmg 2y ago
For?
- sgerenser 2y ago
  Articles that appear to be negative on Tesla or Elon Musk usually get flagged to oblivion.
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    IME it seems to be primarily ones that are just absurdly biased. This story seems extremely relevant, and also sets the stage for an important question to be answered that could have implications even beyond self driving.
- the_duke 2y ago
  Negative Tesla posts often get flagged immediately, probably by a bunch of dedicated Tesla fans/employees trying to surpress it.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    I'm a huge Tesla skeptic, but Tesla and Musk are lightning rods for tabloid-style garbage that doesn't belong on HN, so it doesn't surprise me that we often see negative Tesla content flagged to death. Meanwhile we also see plenty of content that hits the front page and stays there [0]. Do you have examples of professional, interesting Tesla content that got flagged? [0] More than half of the past year's most popular Tesla articles were negative: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=true&query=Tesla&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  It hasn't been flagged (and I haven't). Elon bashing may be fun, it's rarely productive conversation. And when it isn't productive it should be flagged and often is.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

ado__dev 2y ago

Drivers fault 100%. But Tesla is not blameless with their marketing "Autopilot", "Full self driving", blah blah, giving people a false sense of security. I can't think of a worse problem to try and solve with AI. GPT hallucinates and gives a wrong fact. No biggie, but annoying. Tesla FSD hallucinates and runs over a child, a biggie.

GGO 2y ago
Exactly. Tesla shares responsibility for marketing something deceptively that can cause serious incidents. We require toy manufacturers to put clear labels that the toy is not appropriate for certain ages, but allow Tesla to market something as dangerous as Autopilot and FSD, implying that the user is not needed.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Tesla shares responsibility for marketing something deceptively that can cause serious incidents The driver is criminally liable to the estate of the young man he killed. Tesla may be liable for money damages to the driver they misled. (Maybe the estate also has a civil claim on Tesla if they can show its marketing was grossly negligent.)
  - abduhl 2y ago
    Why are you so sure that criminal liability ends with the driver? Washington’s first degree manslaughter law requires “recklessly caus[ing] the death of another person.” Second degree requires merely causing the death of another person “with criminal negligence.” Criminal negligence requires Tesla to “fail to be aware of a substantial risk that a wrongful act may occur” and that this failure be “a gross deviation from the standard of care that a reasonable person would exercise in the same situation.” It’s certainly not hard to make the case for either, especially given Tesla’s apparent inaction after a number of people have died while Autopilot is active and a number of accidents have occurred while Autopilot is active. Cf the Crumbleys: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68223118 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68223118 Also a pedantic point: the driver is civilly liable to the estate. Criminal charges (and hence criminal liability) can only be brought by the state.

mattbillenstein 2y ago

Elon's refusal to adopt lidar - statistically probably fine, anecdotally it could turn out very badly for any one person which is a hard thing to swallow if it's you...

Hamuko 2y ago
Tesla's direction on sensors seems quite ass backwards to me. Didn't they even get rid of parking sensors and replace them with AI vision?
- mattbillenstein 2y ago
  It makes a lot of sense if you're trying to churn out more profit per unit - less costs - they're at the mercy of a sour market atm on the other side of it.
  - frognumber 2y ago
    Honestly, I'd love for Tesla to be civilly liable here, and not the driver. That aligns incentives correctly. Without that, there is every incentive to market "full self-driving," while investing in a system with the intelligence of a trained parrot. As much as it's absolutely the driver's fault, it's also an inevitable accident. Wrongful death is about $500k-$1M (but should be higher). Tesla market cap is $500B. Damages for O(one million people) are equal to Tesla's market cap, so this is not even bad for business; it's simply factoring in externalities into the cost of doing business. A good split might be criminal system for the driver (which ranges from fines to prison time, and is designed to be punitive), and civil system for Tesla (which is only financial, but designed to cover the financial cost of the death to the family).
    - londons_explore 2y ago
      A big bad news headline alone is worth -$1M to tesla. I really wish every single death ended up splitting a fine amongst all companies even tangentially involved. Grandma fell down the stairs and died? Well fine the architect who designed those stairs, and the builder who built them. Sure, all those companies will pass the cost back to the consumer, but the government will pass the fine revenue back to the consumer in the form of reduced taxes. Ends up net zero overall, but everyone now has a real incentive to look out for the health and safety of others.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

GreedIsGood 2y ago

Is this worse than humans? (edit) I see that the article included that FSD is 5x safer than humans, which may be valid. The article then said : "However, the only reason it is safer than the US average is that it is supervised by drivers who ideally pay extra attention when using FSD." I am positive that they had zero data to back that assertion.

AlexandrB 2y ago
Historically these kinds of assertions have been quite misleading. If FSD is mostly used on highways and other "low complexity" environments and then you compare that to human collision rates in all environments, of course FSD will be "safer". Especially if you're measuring collisions/mile vs collisions/hour. Then there are other confounding factors like how Teslas are: * Generally newer than average. * Generally owned by more affluent drivers than average. * Probably used predominantly in urban areas instead of rural ones (to be clear this might unfairly tilt the stats against Tesla thanks to the highway thing). I'm not sure I've seen a good "apples to apples" comparison on this that corrects for these confounding factors.
deely3 2y ago
Do you agree that without "autopilot" this incident would not have happened?
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  I don't think there's any way of knowing that for sure. People look at their phones while driving with and without autopilot.
  - deely3 2y ago
    What about this current incident? In your opinion?
    - ceejayoz 2y ago
      Barring a time machine, we've very little way to know when it comes to one specific incident. Again, people distracted by their cell phones kill people on a very regular basis in vehicles without autopilot. If we had better aggregate stats we could compute the statistical likelihood of it, but this stuff isn't tracked anywhere near as closely or completely as, say, aircraft accidents. I don't trust Tesla's self-reported cherry-picked stats.

frognumber 2y ago

I'd rather the article was more precisely titled "manslaughter" rather than "homicide." As much as in legal jargon, homicide encompasses manslaughter, murder, and a few other things, to many people, homicide is synonymous with murder.

fasthands9 2y ago
I was confused by this too. In the article they do clarify it is "vehicular homicide" which is the same thing as "vehicular manslaughter" legally. A very serious crime, though often times people walk away with this with little or no jail time.
- frognumber 2y ago
  It's not an unreasonable outcome. The goal of the criminal system is to reduce crime, not random vengeance. I can certainly think of a time when I was driving when I missed another car in my blind spot and almost caused an accident, or when I saw someone in a car distracted by a toddler, or similar. Those didn't lead to accidents, but they might have if someone were less lucky. There's a range of ways a car can kill people, ranging from driving through a red light at 100MPH, to an illegal U-turn, to making a stupid mistake, to a completely random fluke of circumstance. On one end of the spectrum, there should be prison time, and regardless of whether an accident happens. On the other end, insurance should pay damages, but I'm not sure what good the criminal system can do in terms of deterrence. If a driver is already doing their best to be safe, but slips up, or even isn't doing their best but isn't being unreasonable, criminal penalties don't seem like the right outcome.
spicybbq 2y ago
Journalists normally report the charge as written in court documents. Washington state appears to have "vehicular homicide" defined as a specific offense, but not "vehicular manslaughter". It would not be more precise to report an incorrect name for the charged offense.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

tromp 2y ago

FSD == Fool Self Driving

jupp0r 2y ago

Independent of the incident itself, the article made it sound like the driver would have benefited from hiring a lawyer before making statements to police.

londons_explore 2y ago
Sounds like he passed the breathalyzer, yet still admitted to 'having a drink' before driving... What a fool...
- AlexandrB 2y ago
  If he's under the legal limit, does it matter if he had a drink?
  - stephendause 2y ago
    Yes. You can be judged to be intoxicated even if you are under the limit.

kibitzor 2y ago

Related video "Tesla Autopilot Crashes into Motorcycle Riders - Why?"[0], summarized to: vision used by Tesla seems to process motorcycles differently, and may be incorrectly "assuming" the closer spaced brake lights on a motorcycle is actually a far away car. More details on the homicide here[1], which shows the crash happened during daylight hours and the bike resembles a sport bike. This is a different condition than my referenced video (night collisions with cruiser-style motorcycles), but I suspect similar incorrect assumptions by Tesla vision happened. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRdzIs4FJJg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRdzIs4FJJg [1] https://www.king5.com/article/traffic/traffic-news/tesla-on-auto-pilot-fatal-crash-motorcycle-snohomish-county-driver-says/281-52ae57e6-4950-4d4d-bbe6-7b2f6dbba5d4 https://www.king5.com/article/traffic/traffic-news/tesla-on-...

bryanlarsen 2y ago
Another theory I've heard is that the driver was holding down the accelerator to prevent phantom braking. If this is true Tesla will likely respond fairly quickly to prove it wasn't them. So the longer they don't the less likely this theory is.
- AlexandrB 2y ago
  > Another theory I've heard is that the driver was holding down the accelerator to prevent phantom braking. Would be interesting to know how commonly this workaround is applied by Tesla owners. If this is common enough it seems like a case where a feature that's merely unreliable becomes a safety issue due to second-order effects. Echoes of Therac 25[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
lamontcg 2y ago
Keep in mind that so far we only have the driver's assertion that they were using Autopilot at the time. The driver may be attempting to shift blame.

lnsru 2y ago

Brand new Model Y with latest software did 4 really dangerous phantom braking stunts. I engaged the system 5 times in total. It’s called enhanced autopilot. I can’t understand how people trust this kind of systems with their lives. Maybe in USA it works much better than elsewhere. But I will never ever turn it again. For the record I didn’t bought it. Got 3 months trial for using referral link.

molticrystal 2y ago

There have been various discussion over the years of adopting and modernizing the model of Equine law , which dealt with injuries from horse & carriages another type of autonomous / semi-automnomous vehicles. In this case in resolving do the people behind the vehicle share some of the blame. An excerpt from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rahulrazdan/2020/01/07/horses-equine-law-and-the-future-of-the-autonomous-vehicle-legal-framework/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/rahulrazdan/2020/01/07/horses-e... >How does the legal system adapt to new technologies? Generally, this is done by constructing new legal theories that should not conflict with older models and also have characteristics of stability and rationality. What might be the potential legal theories for Autonomous Vehicles? Here are the current candidates: >Negligence: Today, a typical example includes impaired driving. An impaired AV? >Negligent Entrustment of Vehicles: Here the driver was negligent, but the owner is liable because they should not have trusted the driver. Can you be found negligent if you trust your Tesla AutoDrive? >Res Ipsa Loquitur: In this theory, (“the thing that speaks for itself”) the accident would not have occurred if not for some action from the plaintiff. By applying this logic, the plaintiff caused the accident because they became startled by an AV homing features because it was surprising. >Product Liability and Warranty: Are there implied warranties associated when you buy an AV? Can it be proven that some AV vendors are safer than others? If so, do all AV vendors have to come to some standard ? >At this point, it is not clear which theory may apply. However, we may gain insight from a very old body of law — Equine Law. Horses were the original autonomous vehicles and for many centuries, the court system had to deal with horse-related accidents. And while probably not applicable a guy texting, an earlier paper from 2012 which explores an interesting aspect about horses in a frightened state which is akin to the vehicle making its own decision in a crisis scenario: "Of Frightened Horses and Autonomous Vehicles: Tort Law and its Assimilation of Innovations" https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1170&context=facpubs https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...