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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

I think the upside of this is that if you get hit by a self-driving car, due to the way the media behaves around self-driving accidents, you can be almost sure that they will deal with it professionally and pay off all damages if it's even remotely their fault.

They might not leave a note on your windshield but they would surely acknowledge the accident and as a company, would have to cooperate with any investigations. It's not some random dude that if they hit and run off you will never see them again.

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> I think the upside of this is that if you get hit by a self-driving car, due to the way the media behaves around self-driving accidents, you can be almost sure that they will deal with it professionally and pay off all damages if it's even remotely their fault.

Tesla and Uber have shown that this is not the case. Tesla tries to throw the driver under the bus or, if that fails, the victim, and Uber has acted especially despicably after their fatal crash.

Perhaps "traditional" car manufacturers with less of a cult behind them will take the PR route, but the behaviour of current companies involved in self-driving vehicles isn't very encouraging.

It isn't really fair to throw Tesla, Uber, and Cruise/GM in the same bucket in terms of liability. Tesla is level 2 automation, Uber is level 3, and Cruise is at least level 4. They all will have different capabilities and different expectations for any potential human driver so the breakdown of liability between the human and the car should vary.

https://www.nhtsa.gov/technology-innovation/automated-vehicl...

Do you have a citation for Cruise being at Level 4? I’m very skeptical of that. Friends of mine at Cruise have privately told me they’re still working towards Level 4.

I think the NHTSA documentation is also insufficiently precise.

I don't have any citations beyond what is in that medium post which should be enough to indicate it is level 4. Level 3 requires a driver to be available to take immediate control of the vehicle. The simple act of sending a car out on a road without a driver shows the car is level 4 (or the company is wildly irresponsible to try it and the state is wildly irresponsible for granting the permit, but hopefully we can rule these out).

I suppose, but the parent post claimed that media attention would drive companies to do the right thing for publicity reasons. The past behaviour of car companies around any accident involving their assistive technologies doesn't really show them caring about the potential negative damage. If the did, they'd had paid out already, regardless of blame.

My point is that the media attention involving crashes won't make companies take responsibility or pay to keep the bad news away, they act like all existing car companies and shift blame onto anyone but themselves instead.

Elaine Herzberg is still dead. Not much upside in that scenario.

That's kinda unfair though. She was jaywalking in the dark far from any crosswalk on a main street. On average 16 pedestrians are killed every day in the United States. While the car could have done better, it's not really clear that she would have survived if the car was driven by a human.

Please stop spreading misinformation. It was only dark in the DVR footage provided by Uber. Actual photos show it was pretty well lit. https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/uber-self-driving-tempe...

> Further, the report says that as long as Vasquez met the minimum visual acuity for a driver's license under Arizona law, and with the lighting conditions at the scene, she "could have seen and recognized that a person was walking across the road from a distance of 1700 feet away with or without the Volvo’s headlights."

Thank you for the correction.

As long as we're correcting this story, note also that "far from any crosswalk" is also completely bogus. The place where the woman was trying to cross is where a paved path leads from a beach, and then just suddenly ends at this road. The only reason it was illegal to cross the road here is because they put up a sign. In the absence of the sign, every architectural feature of this landscape would lead a reasonable person to believe they could be here.

https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4365905,-111.9426898,3a,75y,...

Arizona has quite a few of these no pedestrian crossing signs, combined with the extreme length between intersections/legal crosswalks, it is very hostile to humans.

It’s also the fourth state in pedestrian fatalities per 100k pop. Coincidence?

It's pretty abhorrent that jaywalking is even considered a factor in the eyes of the law. What if you were senile or a child or blind or mentally unwell or intoxicated or running on little sleep, and just took a stumble onto the road? Suddenly your slaughter doesn't matter because you weren't walking on some white paint at the time? I think this needs to be changed.

Yeah it's all good intentions and PR talk until you see how the lawyers respond after an incident. IMHO Uber incident shows that it is extremely unlikely for any human to face criminal charges after a deadly incident with self driving car.

Sure, but that's a problem of the legal system.

Uber was still reachable by authorities, and did show up in court.

All I am saying is that self-driving companies aren't going to pull off a hit-and-run and dodge the fact that an accident did happen. So one doesn't really need to worry about how a self-driving car deals with the note-on-windshield part. More than likely their HQ would be aware of the accident remotely and have legal responsibility to call 911 immediately if necessary. And in the event that a car's algorithm pulled off a hit-and-run on minor property damage, the company would still be easily reachable by authorities and respond to a court summons.

Wouldn't they, as a company, be incentivized to fight desperately to avoid potentially setting a costly precendent?

Absolutely. See Uber's actual response to their deadly incident -- absolving themselves of liability and blaming the backup driver.

Depends. They have incentives to not allow costly precedents. However they also have incentive to ensure that when this goes mainstream there are precedents in their favor.

If they believe the "accident" is either a one-off (meaning they will fix the bug and a whole class never happens again) they will probably pay off quick just because their image is better for that.

If they decide the accident was their fault, not avoidable with better software, AND despite that they are still significantly safer than humans they probably pay out, adjust their price models to insurance against their faults. In this case they may fight, but it will be for "reasonable" settlements (whatever they decide that is, but probably based on similar human caused accidents)

My guess is they think one of the two are the case for everything by now, so the other possibilities don't need to be listed.

Of course the above is my guess. You can be sure those who know are not talking.

That will just happen in the first cases. Then death will normalized and rationalized on being the pedestrians fault. At least that’s how it happened when the automobile was introduced.

Hah, watch them argue you agreed to binding arbitration by driving on the same road as their car.

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