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Seems like culpability should come down to whether or not the Telsa driver could have prevented the accident. Although there's a good argument to be made that

Seems like culpability should come down to whether or not the Telsa driver could have prevented the accident. Although there's a good argument to be made that Tesla's entire system has fundamental design flaws which they have negligently disregarded.

irjustin 1y ago
To me anything less than true level 4 should remain with the driver. I also believe that marketing it as FSD should be liable and scrutinized as a level 4 system. Because when you hear FSD, the public naturally thinks the abilities marked in level 4 arguably even 5.
- Dylan16807 1y ago
  Until the car requests intervention and the timer runs out, levels 3 and 4 are supposed to have the same behavior. If that process has not happened, why should the driver's level of responsibility be any different? (Though a consequence is that levels 3 and 4 are very close together in difficulty. We might not see many level 3 cars.)
  - jeffreygoesto 1y ago
    Volvo was visionary and dismissed Level 3 in about 2014 for being too dangerous. Basically the car drives until it doesn't and you may suddenly die because the time to get the situation and react is too short. Level 3 way purely for managers to claim it would be a linear progression whereas it is petty much THE gorge of automated driving. If you look at the SAE table it's just a little blue wart in a green column, but it's a lethal one. https://www.sae.org/binaries/content/gallery/cm/content/news/sae-blog/j3016graphic_2021.png https://www.sae.org/binaries/content/gallery/cm/content/news...
    - Dylan16807 1y ago
      > because the time to get the situation and react is too short The time is up to the manufacturer, isn't it? Mercedes uses 10 seconds right now and that seems pretty good to me. At that point I know it can't be too dire or the car would have already emergency stopped.
      - close04 1y ago
        > The time is up to the manufacturer, isn't it? The time depends on how quickly an event unfolds in traffic. You can't guarantee 10s notice for an event that is imminent in 2s and the system might not be able to handle or can't detect. The car could become temporarily "blind" for some reason with just 4-5s to brake before a collision. It's enough for a human driver even considering reaction time. But it's impossible to guarantee a minimum time without the ability to predict every issue that will happen on the road.
        Dylan16807 1y ago
        If there isn't a guaranteed minimum time, then it's not level 3, it's advanced level 2. Level 3 needs to be able to handle very rapid events by itself. If it becomes "blind" because of an unexpected total system failure, that's an exception to the guarantee just like your transmission suddenly exploding is an exception. It had better be extremely rare. If it happens regularly then it needs a recall.
        close04 1y ago
        > If there isn't a guaranteed minimum time When dealing with unpredictable real life events there are no guarantees, unless we're considering the many carveouts to that definition from a legal perspective. A blind car (fluke weather, blown fuse, SW glitch, trolley problem) can no longer guarantee anything. Giving the driver 10s, or assuming the worst and braking hard could equally cause a crash. > your transmission suddenly exploding is an exception As long as the brakes or steering work a driver could still avoid a crash. The driver having a stroke is closer to a blind car.
    - Yeul 1y ago
      If you're drinking coffee or reading emails your reaction speed can be way too long to react. Which makes me think: if FSD requires constant hands on steering wheel and concentration what is the point? May as well drive yourself.
      - Dylan16807 1y ago
        You're right but also keep in mind that FSD is level 2.
      - vel0city 1y ago
        I've had several different cars from a few different manufacturers with different levels of ADAS systems and have used them on many long road trips and short trips. I haven't used any Tesla ADAS system for very long though. The highest level of ADAS system I use regularly has facial attentiveness tracking. If you spend too much time drinking coffee or even looking out the sides of the car it will alert you and eventually turn off. So you're not spending a ton of time drinking coffee or reading emails. It's really nice having the car just want to stay in the center of the lane and keep the following distance all on its own. It's less fatiguing on your hands and arms having the car feel like it's in a groove following all the curves for you instead of resisting your input all the time for hours and hours. It's incredibly nice not having to switch between the brake and the gas over and over in stop and go traffic. Instead, the only thing I need to focus on are the drivers around me and be ready to brake. I've driven between Houston, Dallas, and Austin dozens of times with ADAS systems and another dozen or so times with only basic cruise control. It's way nicer when the only time I have to touch the gas and brake are getting on and off the highways. I'm considerably more relaxed and less exhausted getting to my destination. Let's assume all these options are either the same price or an immaterial difference to the price of your next car. If you had an option for a car with basic cruise control or no cruise control, which one would you take? If the option was basic cruise or adaptive cruise which kept pace with traffic and operated in stop and go conditions, which would you choose?
        Yeul 1y ago
        You're right cruise control or whatever you want to call it is definitely great on long journeys on the highway. Maybe car makers should concentrate on those systems?
    - _ea1k 1y ago
      Volvo plans to introduce a level 3 system in the future.
  - irjustin 1y ago
    > levels 3 and 4 are supposed to have the same behavior. This isn't correct. Level 4 doesn't require driver intervention[0]. Hence, why I'm arguing "Full Self Driving" starts here, level 4. So now if you're explicitly not required to "be present" then the system should be liable or at least the "driver" isn't to blame directly. It's actually level 5 is the same as level 4 but add heavy rain, snow, ice, name-your-adverse-condition. [0] https://www.sae.org/blog/sae-j3016-update https://www.sae.org/blog/sae-j3016-update
    - Dylan16807 1y ago
      And the part of my sentence that you cut off was all about the circumstances of intervention. Level 2 requires the driver to choose whether to intervene at all times. This is an unreasonable task for humans. Level 3 puts the car in charge of when intervention is needed, and even once it wants intervention it still has to maintain safe control for several seconds as part of the system spec. Level 4 puts the car in charge of when intervention is wanted, but you can refuse to intervene and it has to be able to park itself. So I will double down on my claim. Until the car requests intervention AND the timer runs out, level 3 and 4 are the same. They require the same abilities out of the car. And that section of time, between wanting intervention and getting intervention, is the hardest part of level 3 driving by far. If you can solve that, you're 90% of the way to level 4. A level 3 car has to be able to handle emergencies several seconds long, and turning it into level 4 is mostly adding the ability to park on the shoulder after you get out of the initial emergency. The gap between 4 and 5 is a bunch bigger. A level 4 car can refuse to drive based on weather, or location, or type of road, or presence of construction, or basically anything it finds mildly confusing. 5 can't. I edited a bit for clarity, but also I'll append a thought experiment as an extra edit: A level 3 car with an hours-long driver intervention timer is basically identical to a level 4 car. If you have a 0 second intervention timer, you're barely better than a level 2 car. How long does the timer have to be before developing your level 3 system is almost as difficult as a level 4 system? I don't think it's very long.
      - irjustin 1y ago
        I agree with your thought experiments and also agree that overall it's a valid, technically accurate interpretation. So, this may be where we agree to disagree. I still stand by level 3 != level 4 in terms of real world liability. Level 3 allows too much wiggle room and sloppiness to be able to legally shift liability away from the driver. At that point you're playing that "intervention period" length. Manufacturers claiming Level 3 will want to lower it as much as possible, regulators raise it. To me, Level 3 simply shouldn't exist. Only at Level 4 is the expectation, without a doubt, the machine is in control. A person in the driver seat is optional because the steering wheel and pedals are as well. When people bought "Full Self Driving" they seriously believe "when can I go to sleep?" ability is where it belongs, which always put the expectation at Level 4.
- cosmicgadget 1y ago
  I believe they call it SFSD (supervised) now.
  - irjustin 1y ago
    wow yeah i didn't know that... what a mess.
    - genewitch 1y ago
      "A lie", FSD as it stands right now is a lie. A few cars might be able to drive a few geofenced places, but no car anywhere can drive anywhere, even with perfect weather and visibility and I'd even wager no traffic or even no other cars at all. Our Subaru gives up steering if there's no olcar in front, on "suburban" and rural roads about 35% of the time. More on some roads, less on others. I cannot determine, while driving, the cause for half of the self driving disable occurrences. No fog line and a broken center for an intersection on a 1 lane road it'll shut off nearly every time. It's surprising when it doesn't. I've clocked nearly a half million miles on the road (I'll be there sometime in the next 9 months), and the range of technical ability you need to drive in just the US, no, scratch that, any given state or even county varies so much and potentially so often that FSD is just a lie to sell cars. I'm willing to upload a full hour drive touring a few parishes around here in my quite heavy Lexus, front and rear cameras, just to prove my point. I'd do it in the subaru but the dashcam isn't very good and also it's lineage is rally so it exaggerates how poor the roads are. My YouTube has dashcam footage of drives that I'm willing to bet no automated system could handle, even if it claimed to be "level 5". Driving after a storm or hurricane is another issue. I know the hazards in general and specifically for the areas I'd need to travel during or after an emergency. I cannot fathom the amount of storage and processing that would take, to have that for every location with roads. On board, in the car? Maybe in 20 years.
      - Dylan16807 1y ago
        > I cannot fathom the amount of storage and processing that would take, to have that for every location with roads. On board, in the car? Maybe in 20 years. Doing some napkin math, with 4 million miles of road in the US, if you wanted to store 1KB of data per meter of road, hundreds of data points, you'd only need 7TB for the entire database. And the processing to make it shouldn't be anything special, should it? Collection would be hard.
delichon 1y ago
Removing the steering wheel and pedals from the robotaxi is Tesla embracing culpability, whether they like it or not. If they are negligent and cannot claim human error they will face huge damage awards.
bumby 1y ago
This is the same attitude that people used to try and avoid any culpability for Boeing in the 737-Max crashes. Even if they was a technical way to avoid a crash, it doesn’t avoid negligent or blatantly bad engineering practices. There’s a reason why engineers are expected to have an ethical duty to the public. Automakers get an industrial exemption on the assumption that the internal processes are sufficient to address the risk…What are we supposed to do when they aren’t?
zombiwoof 1y ago
It seems clear to me at least that Elon did a major pump of FSD, realized he was full of shit so got into politics to try to hack the system in his favor to hide the truth
- genewitch 1y ago
  i think it's fairly easy to get 80+ percent of the way to FSD and it looks like you're on the verge of being able to moat your company with actual FSD. He should and probably did know better - although i've seen lots of videos/articles about how he isn't actually that proficient technically. even if that 80% was 99%, that last 1% will be the cause of some mishaps. my subaru is within a few percent of 80% FSD if everything is turned on. I still technically have to hold the wheel, but the steering only shuts off about 20% of the time with that being met.

irjustin 1y ago

To me anything less than true level 4 should remain with the driver. I also believe that marketing it as FSD should be liable and scrutinized as a level 4 system. Because when you hear FSD, the public naturally thinks the abilities marked in level 4 arguably even 5.

Dylan16807 1y ago
Until the car requests intervention and the timer runs out, levels 3 and 4 are supposed to have the same behavior. If that process has not happened, why should the driver's level of responsibility be any different? (Though a consequence is that levels 3 and 4 are very close together in difficulty. We might not see many level 3 cars.)
- jeffreygoesto 1y ago
  Volvo was visionary and dismissed Level 3 in about 2014 for being too dangerous. Basically the car drives until it doesn't and you may suddenly die because the time to get the situation and react is too short. Level 3 way purely for managers to claim it would be a linear progression whereas it is petty much THE gorge of automated driving. If you look at the SAE table it's just a little blue wart in a green column, but it's a lethal one. https://www.sae.org/binaries/content/gallery/cm/content/news/sae-blog/j3016graphic_2021.png https://www.sae.org/binaries/content/gallery/cm/content/news...
  - Dylan16807 1y ago
    > because the time to get the situation and react is too short The time is up to the manufacturer, isn't it? Mercedes uses 10 seconds right now and that seems pretty good to me. At that point I know it can't be too dire or the car would have already emergency stopped.
    - close04 1y ago
      > The time is up to the manufacturer, isn't it? The time depends on how quickly an event unfolds in traffic. You can't guarantee 10s notice for an event that is imminent in 2s and the system might not be able to handle or can't detect. The car could become temporarily "blind" for some reason with just 4-5s to brake before a collision. It's enough for a human driver even considering reaction time. But it's impossible to guarantee a minimum time without the ability to predict every issue that will happen on the road.
      - Dylan16807 1y ago
        If there isn't a guaranteed minimum time, then it's not level 3, it's advanced level 2. Level 3 needs to be able to handle very rapid events by itself. If it becomes "blind" because of an unexpected total system failure, that's an exception to the guarantee just like your transmission suddenly exploding is an exception. It had better be extremely rare. If it happens regularly then it needs a recall.
        close04 1y ago
        > If there isn't a guaranteed minimum time When dealing with unpredictable real life events there are no guarantees, unless we're considering the many carveouts to that definition from a legal perspective. A blind car (fluke weather, blown fuse, SW glitch, trolley problem) can no longer guarantee anything. Giving the driver 10s, or assuming the worst and braking hard could equally cause a crash. > your transmission suddenly exploding is an exception As long as the brakes or steering work a driver could still avoid a crash. The driver having a stroke is closer to a blind car.
  - Yeul 1y ago
    If you're drinking coffee or reading emails your reaction speed can be way too long to react. Which makes me think: if FSD requires constant hands on steering wheel and concentration what is the point? May as well drive yourself.
    - Dylan16807 1y ago
      You're right but also keep in mind that FSD is level 2.
    - vel0city 1y ago
      I've had several different cars from a few different manufacturers with different levels of ADAS systems and have used them on many long road trips and short trips. I haven't used any Tesla ADAS system for very long though. The highest level of ADAS system I use regularly has facial attentiveness tracking. If you spend too much time drinking coffee or even looking out the sides of the car it will alert you and eventually turn off. So you're not spending a ton of time drinking coffee or reading emails. It's really nice having the car just want to stay in the center of the lane and keep the following distance all on its own. It's less fatiguing on your hands and arms having the car feel like it's in a groove following all the curves for you instead of resisting your input all the time for hours and hours. It's incredibly nice not having to switch between the brake and the gas over and over in stop and go traffic. Instead, the only thing I need to focus on are the drivers around me and be ready to brake. I've driven between Houston, Dallas, and Austin dozens of times with ADAS systems and another dozen or so times with only basic cruise control. It's way nicer when the only time I have to touch the gas and brake are getting on and off the highways. I'm considerably more relaxed and less exhausted getting to my destination. Let's assume all these options are either the same price or an immaterial difference to the price of your next car. If you had an option for a car with basic cruise control or no cruise control, which one would you take? If the option was basic cruise or adaptive cruise which kept pace with traffic and operated in stop and go conditions, which would you choose?
      - Yeul 1y ago
        You're right cruise control or whatever you want to call it is definitely great on long journeys on the highway. Maybe car makers should concentrate on those systems?
  - _ea1k 1y ago
    Volvo plans to introduce a level 3 system in the future.
- irjustin 1y ago
  > levels 3 and 4 are supposed to have the same behavior. This isn't correct. Level 4 doesn't require driver intervention[0]. Hence, why I'm arguing "Full Self Driving" starts here, level 4. So now if you're explicitly not required to "be present" then the system should be liable or at least the "driver" isn't to blame directly. It's actually level 5 is the same as level 4 but add heavy rain, snow, ice, name-your-adverse-condition. [0] https://www.sae.org/blog/sae-j3016-update https://www.sae.org/blog/sae-j3016-update
  - Dylan16807 1y ago
    And the part of my sentence that you cut off was all about the circumstances of intervention. Level 2 requires the driver to choose whether to intervene at all times. This is an unreasonable task for humans. Level 3 puts the car in charge of when intervention is needed, and even once it wants intervention it still has to maintain safe control for several seconds as part of the system spec. Level 4 puts the car in charge of when intervention is wanted, but you can refuse to intervene and it has to be able to park itself. So I will double down on my claim. Until the car requests intervention AND the timer runs out, level 3 and 4 are the same. They require the same abilities out of the car. And that section of time, between wanting intervention and getting intervention, is the hardest part of level 3 driving by far. If you can solve that, you're 90% of the way to level 4. A level 3 car has to be able to handle emergencies several seconds long, and turning it into level 4 is mostly adding the ability to park on the shoulder after you get out of the initial emergency. The gap between 4 and 5 is a bunch bigger. A level 4 car can refuse to drive based on weather, or location, or type of road, or presence of construction, or basically anything it finds mildly confusing. 5 can't. I edited a bit for clarity, but also I'll append a thought experiment as an extra edit: A level 3 car with an hours-long driver intervention timer is basically identical to a level 4 car. If you have a 0 second intervention timer, you're barely better than a level 2 car. How long does the timer have to be before developing your level 3 system is almost as difficult as a level 4 system? I don't think it's very long.
    - irjustin 1y ago
      I agree with your thought experiments and also agree that overall it's a valid, technically accurate interpretation. So, this may be where we agree to disagree. I still stand by level 3 != level 4 in terms of real world liability. Level 3 allows too much wiggle room and sloppiness to be able to legally shift liability away from the driver. At that point you're playing that "intervention period" length. Manufacturers claiming Level 3 will want to lower it as much as possible, regulators raise it. To me, Level 3 simply shouldn't exist. Only at Level 4 is the expectation, without a doubt, the machine is in control. A person in the driver seat is optional because the steering wheel and pedals are as well. When people bought "Full Self Driving" they seriously believe "when can I go to sleep?" ability is where it belongs, which always put the expectation at Level 4.
cosmicgadget 1y ago
I believe they call it SFSD (supervised) now.
- irjustin 1y ago
  wow yeah i didn't know that... what a mess.
  - genewitch 1y ago
    "A lie", FSD as it stands right now is a lie. A few cars might be able to drive a few geofenced places, but no car anywhere can drive anywhere, even with perfect weather and visibility and I'd even wager no traffic or even no other cars at all. Our Subaru gives up steering if there's no olcar in front, on "suburban" and rural roads about 35% of the time. More on some roads, less on others. I cannot determine, while driving, the cause for half of the self driving disable occurrences. No fog line and a broken center for an intersection on a 1 lane road it'll shut off nearly every time. It's surprising when it doesn't. I've clocked nearly a half million miles on the road (I'll be there sometime in the next 9 months), and the range of technical ability you need to drive in just the US, no, scratch that, any given state or even county varies so much and potentially so often that FSD is just a lie to sell cars. I'm willing to upload a full hour drive touring a few parishes around here in my quite heavy Lexus, front and rear cameras, just to prove my point. I'd do it in the subaru but the dashcam isn't very good and also it's lineage is rally so it exaggerates how poor the roads are. My YouTube has dashcam footage of drives that I'm willing to bet no automated system could handle, even if it claimed to be "level 5". Driving after a storm or hurricane is another issue. I know the hazards in general and specifically for the areas I'd need to travel during or after an emergency. I cannot fathom the amount of storage and processing that would take, to have that for every location with roads. On board, in the car? Maybe in 20 years.
    - Dylan16807 1y ago
      > I cannot fathom the amount of storage and processing that would take, to have that for every location with roads. On board, in the car? Maybe in 20 years. Doing some napkin math, with 4 million miles of road in the US, if you wanted to store 1KB of data per meter of road, hundreds of data points, you'd only need 7TB for the entire database. And the processing to make it shouldn't be anything special, should it? Collection would be hard.

delichon 1y ago

Removing the steering wheel and pedals from the robotaxi is Tesla embracing culpability, whether they like it or not. If they are negligent and cannot claim human error they will face huge damage awards.

bumby 1y ago

This is the same attitude that people used to try and avoid any culpability for Boeing in the 737-Max crashes. Even if they was a technical way to avoid a crash, it doesn’t avoid negligent or blatantly bad engineering practices. There’s a reason why engineers are expected to have an ethical duty to the public. Automakers get an industrial exemption on the assumption that the internal processes are sufficient to address the risk…What are we supposed to do when they aren’t?

zombiwoof 1y ago

It seems clear to me at least that Elon did a major pump of FSD, realized he was full of shit so got into politics to try to hack the system in his favor to hide the truth

genewitch 1y ago
i think it's fairly easy to get 80+ percent of the way to FSD and it looks like you're on the verge of being able to moat your company with actual FSD. He should and probably did know better - although i've seen lots of videos/articles about how he isn't actually that proficient technically. even if that 80% was 99%, that last 1% will be the cause of some mishaps. my subaru is within a few percent of 80% FSD if everything is turned on. I still technically have to hold the wheel, but the steering only shuts off about 20% of the time with that being met.