Comment by danudey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danudey | Hacker News Reader

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This sort of technology would be great, even if the data never leaves the user's account, is never farmed by Tesla, and is never used by the autopilot.

Imagine if the parent poster falls asleep at the wheel and does injure or kill someone. They could point to the fact that it's never happened before, but if the court can subpoena Tesla to get data that indicates this guy dozes off with some regularity (and can see indications that he knew about it), then he's going to face a harsher sentence, possibly even bumping it up from involuntary manslaughter to second degree murder if they can argue that it was extremely reckless disregard.

As a daily cyclist who has experienced many close calls over the years at the hands of inattentive, impatient, or unaware drivers, I would love to believe that this world is coming. But unless insurance companies can actually go to work on predicting how accident-prone a person is based on this kind of data, and raising premiums accordingly, I don't know if it will make much difference in terms of actually changing behaviour.

Like, there should already be a lot of this kind of data out there to nail drivers to the wall post-crash, and you just don't really see it happening. Even when someone is killed, everyone involved basically shrugs, says it was a fluke, and tells the family they should get over it and move on (watch for the phrase "came out of nowhere" as a sign that everyone involved has checked out of a particular case).

And how much will consumers accept a car that tattles on them about their bad behaviour? People already lose their minds over provably-effective external automated enforcement measures which rely on plate reading like red light cams and average speed cams.

The court will very likely not have to subpoena anything. Tesla has a history of publicly putting all blame on the driver when Autopilot once again kills a person by driving them into a divider or a stationary truck. They will go out of their way to show and twist the driver's harvested data to their advantage.

Unless AP doesn't allow the driver to control the vehicle it is the drivers fault.

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