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Comment by buffington | Hacker News Reader

I drive a Tesla. If my car rear ends another car, that's my fault. Doesn't matter if I had Autopilot on or not.

Imagine if you were rear ended by a Toyota and the driver said "it was on cruise control, shrug." Would you talk to NTSB or NHTSA about that? Probably not.

The only scenario I can imagine that'd warrant investigation is if the driver were completely unable to override Autopilot. Similar investigations have been started by NTSB when Toyota had issues with their cruise control systems several years ago.

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> I drive a Tesla. If my car rear ends another car, that's my fault. Doesn't matter if I had Autopilot on or not.

You can have a similar argument for: if I'm drunk while driving that's my choice; if I don't cause any accidents, it should be none of anybody's business that I'm drunk.

You see, it doesn't work like that.

If Autopilot poses a significant risk to other road users, then an investigation is warranted.

An NTSB investigation is a separate thing from an accident investigation for fault or insurance purposes. The NTSB does not investigate a drunk driver, that does not mean the drunk driver would be free of fault or charges.

A more apt comparison would be if OP was hit by a drunk driver, and there were no laws against drunk driving. It would be appropriate to ask the government to investigate whether or not drunk driving is safe, because it could happen to many more people.

Except that both Tesla and the law make it clear that in a Level 2 system the driver is responsible at all times, regardless of whether Autopilot is engaged or not.

To stretch the metaphor further, I don't think it's fair to say Tesla makes it clear. Or better, it's not all the story.

People would be less upset with the drunk driver and more with the beer manufacture if they had been imbibing "alcohol free beer" which actually was not alcohol free.

Have you used it? Because its as clear as any system that I've ever used with a clear statement on each activation.

Most other systems are far less clear, IMO.

The car tells you "please keep your hands on the wheel". It then proceeds to nag you if you don't put enough torque on the wheel, and then brings the car to a halt in the middle of the road.

Please don't propagate myths about "Tesla doesn't make it clear that you have to be in control of the vehicle."

My AP has many times disengaged because despite paying attention to the driving I wasn't putting enough torque on the wheel to convince AP that actually had my hands on the wheel.

And a drunk driver is still responsible at all times. That doesn't change the fact that we outlawed drunk driving because it made things worse.

> Autopilot poses a significant risk to other road users, then an investigation is warranted.

You could fault their methods but NTSB is doing just that: waiting for a trend to emerge that would warrant such an investigation.

I'm not suggesting that Tesla's design is not the cause but if the driver were lying in order to shift blame, then NTSB would end up wasting their resources investigating it.

No, you're right, none of what you're talking about works like that.

There was a traffic accident. There are a variety of "automated" driving features in modern cars: Auto-park, cruise control, auto-pilot. Any one of these features could, under "less than ideal" circumstances, cause an accident that doesn't warrant contacting national authorities. Well before any regulatory body is going to do anything, private insurance would. They're going to investigate in an effort to determine fault and facts. Was autopilot to blame, or did the user spill a cup of coffee in the passenger's seat that caused them to take their eyes off the road, etc.

The idea that a national regulatory body is going to start looking into a single car crash seems great until you start thinking about the expense that would create for the taxpayers. Bureaucracy just isn't built to be agile, for better or worse.

Similarly, if you drive drunk and don't cause an accident, nobody will know. This doesn't make it legal, and nobody is trying to argue a point even tangentially similar to that. This is a straw man, and a rather obvious one. There is no national group that would ever investigate a drunk driving crash (assuming that was the only relevant information in the case). That's a local law enforcement issue.

TL;dr- The feds don't care about a sample size of 1 fender bender with no fatalities.

The class of problem called driving while incapacitated was studied and special regulatory attention was applied to it.

An automated driving system that can offer to function while incapacitated without the operater even being informed that there is any problem, is a different problem from an operator that neglected to press the brake pedal. The brake pedal itself and the rest of the braking system is absolutely required to meet a whole bunch of fitness standards.

> If Autopilot poses a significant risk to other road users, then an investigation is warranted.

Except there's no evidence that it does. I drive a Tesla. I've seen AP brake hard in circumstances where a distracted driver would have failed to notice. The system works. It does not work perfectly. But all it has to do to make that "if" clause false is work better than drivers do, and that's a very low bar.

Tesla themselves publish data on this, and cars get in fewer accidents with AP engaged. (So then the unskewers jump in and argue about how that's not apples and oranges, and we all end up in circles of nuance and no one changes their opinion. But it doesn't matter what opinions are because facts are all that matter here, and what facts exist say AP is safer than driving.)

>> If Autopilot poses a significant risk to other road users, then an investigation is warranted.

> Except there's no evidence that it does.

It sounds like you two are talking past one another.

I don't believe op is presenting evidence that it does. Instead, they are saying that there is at least one antidote (TFA) and that someone (presumably a government agency) should investigate it.

First, a very valid reply to there being "at least one anecdote (<-- sp)" is that there is a bunch of actual data on exactly the subject at hand that shows the opposite of the stated hypothesis. You don't throw out or ignore existing data just because one guy on HN got rear-ended!

Second: I think you're being too charitable. I think it's abundantly clear that grandparent believes that there is a "significant risk to other road users", and that this single data point confirms it. And clearly it doesn't.

At the risk of beating a dead horse, the issue is that AP engaged/disengaged isn't a random test, it's a user choice. Presumably people leave AP on when the outside conditions are inherently safer per mile (including, for example, on a highway). If Tesla randomly made AP unavailable some days to some drivers and ran a controlled test, that would be compelling.

You are absolutely beating a dead horse, sorry. This argument gets made repeatedly every time that report gets mentioned and... frankly I'm sick of going through it every time. Nitpicking against a result you don't like without presenting contrary data is just useless pontification. It proves nothing, and has no value but supporting your own priors vs. inconvenient evidence. Find some data.

I mean... there are two million of these cars on the street now, and all but a tiny handful of early Roadsters and S's have full featured autopilot. If there was a significant safety signal in all that data somewhere it would be very clear against the noise background now, and it isn't.

My point wasn't that I had contradicting data. My point was that the data Tesla publishes isn't valuable. It's a different statement. The premise could be right or wrong.

> My point was that the data Tesla publishes isn't valuable.

That's not true at all, and you know it. Consider the extremes: if autopilot got in zero accidents over these however many million miles of travel, you'd have to admit it was safe to use, right? If it got in 10x as many accidents as the median vehicle, we'd all agree it was a deathtrap. There's value in those numbers. Well, the truth is somewhere in between, it gets in 4x fewer accidents (I think) than the median car. That still sounds good to me.

You're just nitpicking. You're taking a genuine truth (that the variables aren't independent because "miles travelled with AP" aren't randomly sampled) and trying to use it to throw out the whole data set. Probably because you don't like what it says.

But you can't do that. The antidote to incomplete or confounded analysis is better analysis. And no one has that. And I argue that if there was a signal there that says what you want ("Tesla AP is unsafe") that it would be visible given the number of cars on the road. And it's not.

Stop nitpicking and get data, basically. The time for nitpicking is when you don't have data.

Yes, a very strong signal (everytime AP is turned on the Tesla explodes or everytime AP is turned on the Tesla drives perfectly from parking spot at origin to parking spot at desitnation, and there has not been a crash in 10 billion miles) can overcome the noise in Tesla's published data. However, any signal there is not that strong and is so weak it is drowned in noise.

Meanwhile, I do have this one datum about how OTA updates caused a couple of accidents (see OP's story.) You cannot just dismiss it because it doesn't agree with a larger trend, if that larger trend is undetectable in the data.

> However, any signal there is not that strong and is so weak it is drowned in noise.

It's a 9x reduction relative to median vehicle and 4x vs. non-AP Teslas! I mean, go read it: https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

You're just making stuff up. That's not a weak signal at all, and you know it. The argument you should be making is that it's a confounded signal. But that requires a level of sophistication that you aren't supplying (nor is anyone else). Which is exactly why I mentioned way upthread that these digressions were so tiresome.

There's literally no data in the world that will satisfy you, just admit it. Yours is an argument from priors only, to the extent that one anecdote ("A Tesla hit me!") is enough to outweigh a report like that.

Tesla themselves publish data on this, and cars get in fewer accidents with AP engaged

This is false, or at very best misleading, considering that Tesla's Autopilot is responsible for more than 10 fatalities. Or in other words, Tesla's AP has killed more people than the entire rest of the domestic auto industry's smart cruise control features. Combined. (And Tesla's "safety" data conspicuously fails to mention any of these fatalities.)

And that doesn't even include all the times that AP ran into stationary emergency vehicles, or the many slow-moving accidents in parking lots, or the many near-misses that were avoided because the other driver was able to avoid the suicidal Tesla in time.

Come on, the "entire rest of the domestic auto industry's smart cruise control features. Combined." constitutes what, 20k vehicles or something like that? It's just in the last few months that we've seen lanekeeping features start to land in volume models, and even then they tend to be extremely heavily geofenced. It's very hard to kill someone when no one has your product and you won't let them use it.

Who's being misleading here?

The entire rest of the domestic automobile industry sold millions of cars with smart cruise control features similar to Autopilot over the past few years, so the misleading one would be...you?

Unless you're now claiming that FSD is just a version of smart cruise control?

"Similar to autopilot" meaning what? Are you trying to say radar speed modulating is the same kind of system? You've completely lost me.

But if you mean vanilla cruise control, people die using that every day.

No, using vanilla cruise control, almost nobody dies every day. It is in fact rare enough that when it happens it gets reported in the news.

The fact that Tesla fans can't grasp the concept that Tesla is (a) not perfect and (b) deliberately endangering people's lives for profit is unfortunately not shocking any more, but it doesn't mean the rest of us have to put up with that schadenfreude.

> If Autopilot poses a significant risk to other road users

It does not, if you use it as Tesla tells you to use it - paying attention to the road at all times and with your hands on the wheel. If you don't do that, Autopilot is probably still better than distracted driving - over the years I sometimes would catch myself drifting off in my thoughts as I was driving to the point where I wasn't even sure how I drove my car for the past few seconds. I bet this happens to others, too, and often. Between that and even semi-autonomous Autopilot, Autopilot seems like a safer choice, and it'll only get better from here on out, though I don't think we're anywhere near real "FSD" where you'd be able to read a newspaper as the car drives itself.

I think that outside of a courtroom, it's possible to recognize "layers" of responsibility, for lack of a better term. I can think of a couple of scenarios:

1. In an industrial plant, equipment needs to be fitted with guards and other protective measures, even if it's arguable that sticking your hand into an exposed rotating mechanism, or grabbing a live electrical circuit, is your fault. If someone's hurt, and there's an investigation, the factory will be cited for not having the proper guards. From what I've read, this is one of the things that we now take for granted, but was hard won through labor activism resulting in a dramatic reduction in workplace deaths.

2. The European approach, where they assign "fault" for a crash, but at the same time investigate how the infrastructure can be redesigned to make the crash less likely.

Yes I would hope that a regulatory body investigates the OP's crash. At the same time, I've read some comments in HN that Tesla drivers hover their foot over the accelerator in case of "ghost" braking. Naturally this is anecdotal. Still, the driver could have mistakenly stepped on the wrong pedal.

VERY generally, in the US, the jury assigns a percentage of fault to each party. E.g., Defendant 1 was 40% at fault, Defendant 2 51%, Defendant 3 5%, and the Plaintiff 4%.

Plaintiff can collect 40% of his damages from D1, etc. Some states will allow Plaintiff to collect 96% from D2, and give D2 the right to collect the other defendants' proportionate share from them.

The big black box makes a mistake and you voluntarily accept the blame? I really don't get this train of thought. I know that this is legally correct, but at some point in time along the technological advancement of self driving technology we'll have to stop blaming ourselves and legally shift the blame to whoever created the self driving tech instead.

Edit: Updated wording to make it less confusing. From system to whoever created the self driving tech.

Because as the driver you're responsible for the tool you're using to drive your self to your destination. That means you're responsible for whether or not you use Autopilot, do 200kmph, take your hands off of the steering wheel, turn your lights on at night, and everything else associated with the operation of that vehicle.

> ... at some point in time along the technological advancement of self driving technology we'll have to stop blaming ourselves.

No we don't. We built it, so we're responsible for it and the consequences associated with its operation, regardless of how well it's engineered or how smart we think we are.

I didn't build it, Tesla did, and I personally think the company that signed off on "touch screen controlled window wipers" is the one with the most liability in autopilot failures.

Context: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53666222

> We built it, so we're responsible for it and the consequences associated with its operation, regardless of how well it's engineered or how smart we think we are.

That's my point. The company that built the self driving technology should be held responsible. If you're not driving you're not responsible, that's how it works when somebody else is driving your car as well so why would it be any different if that somebody else is code? It seems like a good way to align the incentives to create a safe system. You could claim that at this point in time you still have to pay attention and take control when necessary, the issue I have with that argument is that we already have research showing us that the context switch results in a delay that's too long to be really useful in practice.

Yeah and honestly the chain of responsibility is driver first then tesla. What's important is the victim gets their payout. It's the drivers responsibility to provide that payout / get dinged on insurance. if the driver then wants to complaint to tesla for damages that's totally fair. But the victim's compensation should come first from the driver. The driver can't say "but muh autopilot" and release all blame

The OP was very clearly not looking at a payout, but at preventing future incidents.

The question is the driver responsible? Should it be the owner? Should it be the company who made the failing product?

If your toaster blows up and kills someone a solid case against the maker of toasterb

Yes, and no. With other dangerous tools, society decided manufacturers have responsibilities, too.

If you buy a chainsaw, you can trust it has certain safety features. If you buy a children’s toy, you can trust it doesn’t use lead paint, etc.

Those aren’t features you, as a consumer, have to explicitly test for before using them.

Similarly, I think society will demand that cars behave as cars, and not as projectiles. If a manufacturer claims a car has auto-pilot, but that auto-pilot has a tendency to rear end other cars, the manufacturer should carry at least some blame.

I think that should be true even if they explicitly mention that problem in the instruction manual. Certainly in the EU, whatever you buy, you can assume it is “fit for its purpose”.

The problem here is Tesla does not make the claim that the car is autonomous, in fact they clearly state otherwise, nor it is legal for any driver to operate the car like it was autonomous

To continue your analogy Chainsaw manufacturers include clear instructions, and directions to use safety PPE.. if a operator of the chainsaw fails to follow the instructions, or where the PPE and chops their leg off the manufacturer is not liable.. Hell even if they did follow the instructions and chop their leg off it would be unlikely the manufacturer would be liable.

Lets take the analogy one step further. Imagine we have an Autopilot chainsaw, you just have to touch it every once in a while to tell it to keep sawing. Then suddenly it starts sawing in a completely unexpected way and causes an accident. Are you at fault because you have to, in theory, keep in control at all times? Even though you in practice relinquish control and humans don't have the ability to context switch without a delay? The issue would not have occured if the chainsaw didn't start behaving in an unexpected way but it also would not have occured if you didn't use the Autopilot function.

>> Are you at fault because you have to, in theory, keep in control at all times?

Yes...

We already have examples of this with machinery that is automated. The Humans in charge of these automated machines are responsible for monitoring them, and have things like emergency shut downs, and various other safety protocols to shut them down when (not if When) they do unexpected things.

Machines are machines, they fuck up. The manufacturers are not held liable because the know these types of abnormal conditions exist they is why they have the safety protocols and human minders.

An example of this is the auto manufacturer i believe in TN or TX that did not train the operators properly on the safe way to operate, and lock out a machine, this failure to train lead to human injury. The manufacturer of the robot was not liable, the company that failed to train the human staff was.

Stick to my example please, your example is not the same type of situation.

There is no need to stick to your strawmen when we have real world actual examples. If you demand others only address your strawmen then you have recognized the weakness of your argument

I merely changed a car to a chainsaw, it's an analogous situation. There is no strawman, a strawman is a fallacy where the new argument is easier to attack. This is the same argument.

Your example on the other hand is not relevant to the situation at hand, it misconstructs the problem. The machine required trained operators to operate the machine, driving a car requires a trained operator but that is where the similarities stop. You don't need any additional training to operate autopilot. If someone without a license sits behind the steering wheel they're at fault cause they're not supposed to drive the car in the first place, this would be an analogous situation. Yours, as pointed out, is not.

He answered your question with a yes. If you buy and operated some chainsaw with an assistance technology and it automatically cuts down your neighbors tree then you are responsible. Your neighbor doesn't sue the chainsaw manufacturer, they sue you. You can sue the manufacturer all you want too, but the court won't let you tell your neighbor its the chainsaw manufacturer's fault and you are innocent.

I know what he replied with, a yes and an irrelevant example so that leaves just the yes. What I'm after is a stronger, relevant argument.

Let us not forget my original argument. Where I said that this is the current legal situation, I just think that this will change in the future if autonomous actions (driving or other behaviors) keep improving. I believe we have reached a point where it's not necessarily clear anymore who is in the wrong. Not in a legal sense, the law tends to run after the facts. More in a moral sense.

> The problem here is Tesla does not make the claim that the car is autonomous

Tesla's own marketing disagrees with this. Here's what Tesla says they mean when they say "Autopilot" and "Full Self-Driving":

> The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware...

That is marketing video from 2016, which many including the NTHSA criticized Tesla over, and which Tesla has updated documentation, driver prompts, and other marketing to reflect that the system is not "autonomous" infact if you look at the product pages they clearly say "full self-driving capabilities in the future—" this is also reflected by prompts to the driver, warnings to the driver, and the requirement that the driver provide feedback to the car they are in control...

>That is marketing video from 2016, which many including the NTHSA criticized Tesla over, and which Tesla has updated documentation

I can speculate from people sleeping when driving Teslas that there are some drivers that interpret the marketing and documentation contradiction as "the laws forced Tesla to add this warnings in the documentation, Elon said autopilot is OK".

but the autopilot makes you nudge the wheel every 30 seconds. if people are really sleeping in their teslas they have added a device to defeat this attention tracking mechanism

This makes my point that those sleeping drivers when they had to chose between

1 marketing message" Autopilot works and stupid politics forces us to release it with this tons of boilerplate warnings and having to pay attention"

2 the actual disclaimers the car will show you

this drivers chose to believe 1, this is obvious that marketing is undermining the reality, so IMO Elon and his marketing should be criminally responsible for undermining their own official message.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_liability:

“Product liability is the area of law in which manufacturers, distributors, suppliers, retailers, and others who make products available to the public are held responsible for the injuries those products cause.”

A specific example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escola_v._Coca-Cola_Bottling_C.... : somebody uses a soda bottle as intended, gets hurt, and wins a case against the manufacturer of the bottle.

If you don’t follow instructions, that still can happen, but it will be harder to argue that a problem originated with the manufacturer.

I agree, but if you bought a tool called "autopilot" and it piloted you into another car, there is something wrong, no? Maybe not the NHTSA, but it seems like someone should be tallying that.

Has Tesla ever said anything like: the “auto” in this case means “automobile” and not “automatic”?

But yeah, they shouldn’t call it that.

Incorrect. You are responsible for using the tool responsibly and according to any applicable directions and best practices.

Yes, and that point is most likely SAE level 5, as shown here (https://www.nhtsa.gov/technology-innovation/automated-vehicl...). We are some way away from that - just how far depends on whose hype you listen to.

I drive a Tesla Model 3, but I have sufficient grey matter to understand that AutoPilot, in spite of its name, is SAE level 2 (see above reference). If the car is involved in an impact either something hit me, or I hit something - no blame attaches to the computer, because I’m still in charge. Given the current state of the art, I’m perfectly happy with that and bloody livid at anybody who is dumb enough to buy/lease and drive one of these amazing machines without being constantly and totally aware of their limitations.

> Yes, and that point is most likely SAE level 5

Hard disagree.

This is the same as identity theft, where it becomes your responsibility instead of a failure on the part of the bank to protect your account, and the burden gets shifted entirely onto the consumer.

Relevant Michell and Webb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E

If Tesla sells a SAE Level 2 lane following / accident avoidance feature which should be able to stop and avoid rear end collisions, yet it causes rear end collisions, they must be liable for that failure. They can't just write words and shift all liability onto the consumer for the software failing to work properly. Nice try though.

And I don't care if the consumer technically agreed to that. If someone smacks into me with Autopilot enabled, I never consented to that technology and didn't give up my rights to sue Tesla.

If someone hits your car while using the car features is exactly why you can sue both the driver and Tesla. You’re very likely to in against the driver, the other isn’t really tested in court. Your mileage may vary.

Also, how is the bank supposed to protect your account if you give your login information away to a criminal? There are a non-negligible amount of cases where the consumer compromises their accounts themselves. The responsibility lies on both. The burden often isn’t placed on the consumer either. Merchants are often the ones that pay the highest price.

I saw an old dude apparently asleep behind the wheel of a tesla while on the freeway. I immediately feared for my family members’s lives, and I had to speed in order to gain distance from this fellow.

when you turn on autopilot it tells you to keep your hands on the wheel and if it senses you are distracted it will turn it off if you don't wiggle the wheel a little to show you are paying attention. So at least as far as autopilot is concerned I would say the driver is at fault if they run into another car.

I think there is a good argument that now is a good time for a liability shift for certain types of accidents with TACC. TACC should never be rear ending people.

a bad actor can easily create an accident of this description, no?

How? Hard braking shouldn't do it. Cutting in front potentially could, but that'd be a different problem.

It’s a driver aid, not a driver replacement. I’m responsible for where my airplane autopilot takes the airplane (in large part because I’ll be the first one to arrive at the accident scene).

Why shouldn’t the driver be responsible for accidents in the car they’re driving at the current level of driver assist technology?

Yeah, I know, but I'm starting to think that we've reached a point that this shouldn't be an excuse for straight up rear end collisions. They should be forced to make the black box available and take liability if the driver didn't take over.

There's no reason that TACC shouldn't be able to handle the basic job of not running into the car in front of it in the vast majority of circumstances.

This is so tremendously NOT a case of personal responsibility. A large portion of our economy attempts to rely on the belief of: "you said it would do x, it must do x".

You bought a car, it promised functionality, it did not deliver and endangered another human/their property.

This is the fault of the manufacturer.

Here are some examples of non-autonomous driving cases where the manufacturer made a false promise: Volvo lawsuit: https://www.motorbiscuit.com/volvo-owners-seeking-class-acti...

Toyota recall after lawsuit https://www.industryweek.com/the-economy/article/21959153/to...

Chevy lawsuit: https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/consumer-pro...

It is my sincere hope that we can enjoy Elon's persona without just letting Tesla off the hook of being a car company. Or really, a company.

Fortunately, in the US, responsibility usually isn't an all or nothing proposition. Tesla can be responsible for a FSD bug, the driver responsible for not paying attention, the driver in the other lane for swerving, the tire shop for not putting the tires on right, etc.

It's so odd that in stories like this people don't even ask this simple question: did you try to brake?

It's usually conveniently omitted from the story.

Based on videos and observed driving behavior, it seems the marketing and documentation for Autopilot is ineffective at communicating to drivers that Autopilot is basically advanced cruise control. If this is correct, it represents a systemic issue that should be investigated by the NTSB or NHTSA.

https://tesla.com/autopilot

In the video there it says:

"THE PERSON IN THE SEAT IS ONLY THERE FOR LEGAL REASONS.

HE IS NOT DOING ANYTHING. THE CAR IS DRIVING ITSELF."

Total lie unless they are psycopaths and would be willing to run it with no one in the seat if not for legal reasons. In other words unless they were willing to murder if murder were legal--the video is from 2018 or maybe even earlier, where we know they were nowhere near ready for driverless.

Did you consider that that text is about the video and not about the feature in their cars as sold to the public?

Do you think they could have filmed that video with no driver in the seat without high risk of killing someone? Only "legal reasons" kept them from doing it, they have no ethics?

On top of that it greatly mislead people about how soon it would be, and how far along they were. Buyers who they were charging like $9,000 to at the time.

The moment you use Autopilot it's evident that it's basically a fancy cruise control. You're assuming some people would not interfere with Autopilot in any scenario. To think somehow people with that much lack of common sense exist is odd. It shows a massive level of disregard for those people's ability to perform basic functions.

I literally saw a driver operating erratically in stop and go traffic. As I attempted to pass I noticed they were reading a book and driving “hands free.” They were driving a Tesla, and presumably using Autopilot. I’m sure some people operate like they’re a test driver, but there’s also folks who don’t understand the basic functions of being a tester.

Not using brakes when car is approaching a red traffic light is failing at a basic function. Being distracted by text messages, phone, etc. is not.

That may be the legal reality we live in - it's true that if a driver in a Toyota rear-ended someone else, there would be (and should be) no NTSB/NHTSA safety investigation. The driver was simply at fault, they should be appropriately penalized and will hopefully not do it again.

The difference is that safety improvements to Autopilot can scale. Patch the software or upgrade the hardware to fix the root cause of this collision and future collisions can be avoided!

> I drive a Tesla. If my car rear ends another car, that's my fault. Doesn't matter if I had Autopilot on or not.

It is supposed to be super-self-driving... it has to count for something.

No it's not. I didn't spend $10k for full self driving. That's not the same feature as Autopilot.

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