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You can't just blanket say everything is irrelevant because it doesn't fit your narrative. If he reported the system wasn't working, why would he continue using it especially in a known problematic area?

Because he was assured by Tesla that it was working, and there was no problem. They were clearly wrong.

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.

There's a difference between "couldn't find a problem" and "no problem".

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.

Nobody was forcing him to use the feature if he knew it wasn’t working as intended on that particular stretch of road. My issue with your statements are you’re shifting 110% of the blame to Tesla when that isn’t remotely the case.

And my issue with your statements is that you're trying to have it both ways: you're claiming both that "there is no problem" and "Tesla told him about the problem so it's his fault". You have to pick one.

Nowhere do I say there is no problem so I’m not sure why you’re quoting that. I acknowledge there may be a problem since he shouldn’t have been using autopilot on that known problematic strip of road.

> he shouldn’t have been using autopilot on that known problematic strip of road.

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.

Sure they do, it isn’t enabled 100% of the time. It only enables it when it has the confidence it can perform its task. There are plenty of times where it wouldn’t be available to me for various reasons, either road conditions or weather conditions.

> Because he was assured by Tesla that it was working, and there was no problem. They were clearly wrong.

This doesn't hold up if you refer back to the comment that states he contacted them 7-10 times.

Because it’s on his daily commuting path? If the autopilot globallly function well and give him added security why should he disconnect it?

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?

Based on his complaints I don’t see how we can infer it gave him added security which would warrant continued use. If I knew a tool I used around the house wasn’t working completely as advertised I wouldn’t continue using the feature that wasn’t working for me.

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.

As I see it it’s a minor bug with horrible consequences. What is shocking is not the bug itself, nor the lack of a quick bugfix, but inability to acknowledge the problem and lack of basic and sincere human empathy.

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?

> How can anybody in his right mind have vetted this last sentence?

Agreed. Unfortunately, Elon himself probably wrote that.

> 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?

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...

I think it’s a fine example when applied to 7 different times. That’s past a reasonable amount of times to place your trust in a system at that point. You’re just self inflicting pain if you do the same thing over and over again and expect different results.

I'm a new Model S over, and it's hard for me to believe anyone would believe them. The autopilot makes egregious errors during any prolonged use. You should feel more alert and engaged when using it at this point.

> the man died because of that issue

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.

Proximate cause is irrelevant. This is a product liability issue because the product failed, which means strict liability applies.

Failed under what conditions, though? The manufacturer gets to specify the conditions under which they consider their product to be safe and suitable for a particular purpose. The car was not used under those conditions and the result was injury through misuse of the product.

If my toaster causes me serious injury because I used it in the bath, that is my problem.

Product liability (in the US) attaches to the normal usage of a product, whether that is an intended usage of the product or not.

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.

To be fair, a car isn't normally used for driving on the freeway without looking where you're going for 5+ seconds at a time.

> The manufacturer gets to specify the conditions under which they consider their product to be safe and suitable for a particular purpose.

No, they don't, otherwise they could disclaim everything.

> Proximate cause is irrelevant. This is a product liability issue because the product failed, which means strict liability applies.

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.

> I am not a lawyer, but it is not clear to me just yet that the product failed.

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.

> 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.)

Car steered itself into a concrete wall. That is, by definition, failure. It doesn't matter whether it was properly following its coding to follow lane lines.

Wow, reading the comments in that post are amazing. The echo-chamber, Stockholm Syndrome is full blown on that subreddit...

Look, I'm old and cynical too, but we can't do character assassination in this way. You need to take issue with specific facts or your argument comes across as extremely weak.

The post was downvoted almost to oblivion, and blocked until the admins released it. Just read the comments. Most of the "character assassination" is commentors attacking the OP on Reddit.

Could you please point to the source where it says that Tesla said it wasn’t an issue? All I read describes that they couldn’t reproduce the issue. That is something different.

It's a feature that is in development and you can not use it if you don't want to.

Everybody knows ad is alerted by the fact that self driving technology is not there yet. The driver knew that.

> It's a feature that is in development

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".

Then why on earth does Tesla refer to it as autopilot ?

Words have consequences and in this case deadly consequences.

That makes absolutely no sense. You're basically saying that Tesla's statement made it OK that the driver did not pay attention to what was going on, which is something which is required 100% of the time when Autopilot is functioning correctly. (It's a L2 system, and reminds the driver to continue paying attention each time it is turned on.)

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.