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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

Until Tesla (or any other manufacturer) assumes legal liability for any crashes via autopilot, this is all empty posturing. If you believe in your product, then put your money where your mouth is, end of story. Until then, please don't waste your breath, because that's incontrovertible proof that you don't believe in the safety of your product.

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This. When you buy $500 geohot’s hack - you can posture as much as you want. But when you pay 10k you assume you get some guarantees and insurance.

Legal liability is something to be decided by local laws? Would insuring the cars cheaper would be closer to "money where your mouth is". Anyone using this: is their insurance cheaper? https://www.tesla.com/insurance

Anything that improves crash statistics over those produced by human drivers is an improvement. It does not have to be perfect, but it does need to show it's safer than the average legal human driver.

I will do it by extending insuring as Tesla if autopilot is used. If they are right they will make a killing

Car companies have improved safety significantly even beyond regulated requirements. None in history have assumed legal liability for crashes.

Therefore no car company that currently exists believes in safety?

Toyota, quite famously, was ordered to pay a $1.2 billion fine for the unintended acceleration issue.

How much more liable for you want?

Go ahead and nitpick how it's not strict legal liability.

This is a different situation, the car can drive itself (supposedly). If the car could drive itself perfectly, then it would make 100% sense for the manufacturer assume liability for autopilot driver accidents under its own insurance. Eventually this will become the case - disengaging autopilot will automatically increase your monthly insurance premium.

Presumably a car manufacturer would be liable if a safety-critical part malfunctioned, say the brakes.

Autopilot is like brakes that the maker says "they usually work but no guarantees". A higher autonomy level system would be like brakes that actually are guaranteed to work.

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