Whether or not it's a full self-driving mode, or if it's an assisted auto-pilot, or even if it was just some lame GPS navigation, is completely irrelevant. The bottom line is: there was an issue that was reported, Tesla denied it, the man died because of that issue, and now Tesla is contradicting themselves by saying there is an issue, but are deflecting blame.
At this point, Tesla is eroding the ability for anyone to put trust in their cars. What if you have a Model X and one day it unsafely opens the doors while you are driving on the highway, so you take it to the dealer but they say "nope, can't replicate the issue, your car is safe to use". Are you going to believe them? Why, when they've just confirmed that they have a track record of being wrong?
Oh wait, that already happened: https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/6giiao/my_mode...
As for the relevance: sure I can. My post about Tesla's contradiction has no relevance on what kind of autopilot it was. Tesla denied there was an issue, contradicted themselves by then saying there is an issue, and now is casting blame on the user for that issue. That's not acceptable. It would be unacceptable if we were talking about windshield wipers, or tires, or door locks, or the fucking clock on the dashboard. It is all about Tesla's denial of the issue and contradiction of themselves, and the type of autopilot is completely irrelevant.
This doesn't hold up if you refer back to the comment that states he contacted them 7-10 times.
Tesla don't make preconditions on where to use their autopilot. How many Tesla's discover a new 'problematic' strip of road each day? Is every first Tesla to drive down a new road to become a crash-test dummy when it turns out the autopilot just can't handle that next bend in the road?
It's absurd to think so. The product is not fit for purpose. I'm confident the law would agree.
He went to them multiple times and they couldn't reproduce the problem. Sounds fairly standard. I'd be surprised if you can cite them saying there is definitely no problem.
But if the car consistently swerve toward the barrier in certains circumstances, doesn’t it increase the probability of a crash because it programmatically increase risk of accident in an otherwise safe situation. And then isn’t Tesla culpright of not treating bug report appropriately?
As a beta user of bank software where clicking transfer money ended up sending twice as much, wouldn’t it be my fault if I did it 7 more times when I acknowledged its behavior even if it wasn’t as advertised?
I realize my examples are hard to compare to this specific situation, but the software is opt in and is littered with disclaimers because it’s not a level 3+ autonomous vehicle.
To quote Tesla statement "We empathize with Mr. Huang's family,(...), but the false impression that Autopilot is unsafe will cause harm to others on the road." and the last sentence is by far the worst "The reason that other families are not on TV is because their loved ones are still alive."
Seriouly the most urgent thing to do for Tesla is maybe to fire the head of PR. How can anybody in his right mind have vetted this last sentence?
Agreed. Unfortunately, Elon himself probably wrote that.
Bad example. "Hey, this is broken, it did this." You say. They say "Nope, no problem/ fixed." You do it again. "Still broken!" "All good!". Again...
If things worked the way you want it to, no car company would every say anything to any customer other than bland statements drafted by lawyers.
Everybody knows ad is alerted by the fact that self driving technology is not there yet. The driver knew that.
there's something fundamentally wrong in releasing that to the public then, your authority for vehicle safety should be VERY concerned about this, people getting killed aren't "bugs to iron out".
Words have consequences and in this case deadly consequences.
Tesla would argue that the proximate cause was that the driver was not paying attention.
> And now Tesla is saying that there is an issue, and that it's his fault for using the system.
Tesla is not saying that it's his fault for using the system. They are saying it is not Tesla's fault if the driver wasn't paying attention, despite being presented with repeated warnings closely preceding the impact.
I am not a lawyer, but it is not clear to me just yet that the product failed. We don't know what the investigation will show.
It's not clear to me whether it was a design defect or a manufacturing defect, but it's pretty clear that the lane keeping system drove the vehicle into a barrier which was not, in fact, located in a traffic lane, killing the occupant, which is pretty obviously a failure.
Reflecting on your reply and gamblor956's post below, and after reviewing the published photos, I concede this looks like the most likely scenario, and if that is what actually occurred, it would unequivocally be a failure.
(That said, there's still a chance, however small, that whatever seems obvious now ends up being invalidated by the investigation. I just don't like feeling certain about things like this, especially from a distance.)
If my toaster causes me serious injury because I used it in the bath, that is my problem.
A toaster is not normally used in the bath, so that does not create product liability issues. A car is normally used for driving...in fact, that's a car's primary use...so product liability would attach to its driving-related functional failure.
No, they don't, otherwise they could disclaim everything.