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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Well, as a company you can choose to do the right thing, or you can choose to weasel your way out of uncomfortable situations using lawyers and the fact that the law is always lagging behind technological development.

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Musk has been talking about self driving cars for over a decade. Law has had enough time to catch up.

That is not the user's fault.

No, but it is the government's.

Exploiting the sloppiness of the government and using it against the user is not what I would call good behavior.

Still, the situation at hand is primarily fault of the government - which should've taken care of it at the very least 5 years ago, or sooner. It isn't a problem exclusive to Tesla, Mercedes has a very similar feature called Drive Pilot (introduced in 2013 IIRC) and except for the most recent model year a malfunction is a problem of the user just like with Teslas.

BTW this isn't even about any lawyers and EULAs, there's simply no legal way how a company like Tesla or Mercedes could take responsibility for a crash, so IMHO Tesla is at least nice enough to spell it out, unlike Mercedes.

> there's simply no legal way how a company like Tesla or Mercedes could take responsibility for a crash

This seems unlikely to be true, unless of course they weaseled themselves in this position.

Read through the laws about deciding blame in car crashes. There isn't a single word about transferring blame to the manufacturer, and thus it's not possible - and the law specifically says that the driver has responsibility. Nobody had to specifically weasel themselves into it, just the states kept sleeping a decade too long.

I'm not going to read through law texts, but I'm sure that there are provisions for the case where the manufacturer made a design error and is responsible for a crash.

This isn't the case though, the car works as advertised and licensed, the problem here is that the law makes the driver responsible for something they shouldn't be.

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