Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

The bigger problem is that I am trusting my life to you using it. This goes way beyond defective product and normal risk, the fact that these things happen endangers everybody on the road, not just those that decided to throw in their lot with Tesla.

View on HN

If I refuse to use a product because I think it's too dangerous, but I die anyway because of your use of the dangerous product, does my estate sue you personally for gross negligence, or must my estate sue the maker of the product?

Naturally if my estate sues you personally, your defense would be that you didn't know the product was dangerous. Perhaps if the whistleblower's leak is widely publicized, that would weaken your defense.

Certainly the leak should weaken the maker's ability to claim they didn't know.

In the U.S., product-liability law allows you to sue the product's manufacturer (and everyone else in its supply chain including retailer); you don't have to sue the driver under some sort of "negligent ownership" theory.

(IAAL, but this is greatly simplified -- consult a licensed attorney.)

Except guns of course, because... America.

The argument that a firearm that kills or injures someone when used correctly is a defective product is a difficult one to make because, well, that's what it was designed to do. However, if a poorly-designed or -built firearm blows up in the user's hand, then that would probably be considered defective, and the injured person might well prevail on a defective-product liability claim.

Maybe companies should design new car models specifically to kill, that way when it happens they can truthfully claim it was exactly what it was designed to do, it would work regardless if it happens by accident or intentional as long as the buyer is not the victim, exactly like with guns.

you are being extremely misleading and agendaed here. Either you have been brainwashed by propaganda, or you are intentionally doing it.

You cannot sue Mercedes if someone decides to use a car they manufactured to ram into people on the sidewalk. Well, Maybe you can sue, but you can absolutely not win.

On the same line of logic, you absolutely can not sue Walmart if your relative gets stabbed by a knife they sold, Had manufactured, or similar.

And then along the same line of logic, you cannot sue a gun manufacturer/dealer if someone decides to use a gun they sold/manufactured to harm someone.

Guns dont kill, people kill.

IF however a gun manufacturer ran advertising suggesting people buy their guns to shoot up farmers markets, schools etc. Or if gun sellers ran advertising with subliminal messages urging people to whack their neighbor, well then you absolutely CAN sue them, and would probably have a good case.

More similarly to this case here, IF a gun manufacturer made a gun that is obviously defective, leading to injury/death, and you had a leaker come and show evidence they knew about it, and didnt care, well then you would probably have a good case aswell.

> Guns dont kill, people kill.

Yeah, I see someone brainwashed and agendaed here and is not me. BTW if that phrase had any hint of truth to it people could just buy nuclear weapons as long as they can afford it, but no, we know that is too much power to be handed to the capriciousness of a single random person, but they pretend it's any different with handguns; manufacturers and everyone else involved know the next victim will be some kid they don't know and therefore don't care about and doesn't concern them at all, while nuclear warfare is much ore likely to affect them directly so it cannot be abstracted away as a statistic.

manufacturers of cars knows that X amount of kids they dont know is gonna be victims of car crashes....

yes, I have an agenda, its called freedom and anti-violence. You dictating I cannot have a gun is violence against me. Same as if I tried to dictate you cannot have a car

It’s not violence to forbid someone from owning a gun. We can’t own many things, including other human beings. And many other countries forbid people from owning firearms, and life goes on, peacefully.

people are shot with guns in all those countries that forbids gun ownership, people are also stabbed, clubbed, many other things.

but yes, it is violence. owning another human being would be too, and you for sure are also aware that it is not even comparable to own a piece of metal/plastic/wood and a human being.

It's true that there's no such thing as a society that is entirely free of gun violence - or any sort of homicide, for that matter. But that's not the goal, and it never has been. The goal is to reduce such incidents down to a level that is comparable to that of other countries - a mere fraction of what exists today in the U.S.

Gun control isn't perfect, but it does a pretty good job in most of the world. You can't let perfection be the enemy of improvement.

Also a very good point, which makes an even stronger case for throwing the regulatory kitchen sink at this bullshit

Tesla self-driving is better than a bad human driver. There are loads of bad human drivers on the road. Someone has to be liable, but I don't really care if it falls to Musk or a Musk simp. I do care if we kick yet another key technology out of the US only to have to rent it back years later when someone else picks up the torch. Let's not do that.

I am not sure I agree with your assessment. Last time I was in a FSD Tesla, it repeatedly tried to run red lights and didn't know how to merge lanes on a freeway...

I don't own one, but I watch a video on youtube every time one of these threads comes around and it seems to be pretty good these days.

Your examples are bad. People do both of those things all the time.

This is delusional. "It's fine because I watched some videos and some irresponsible people often drive recklessly anyway."

No, people do not do either of these all of the time… and neither does the Tesla. They exist in a continuum between murder-suicide and a lovely cruise along the coast. The idea here is that we have insufficient data to see just how flagrant of assholes Tesla FSD users are.

>I watch a video on youtube every time...

survivorship_bias_airplane.jpg

Access to most of the latest versions of FSD were doled out on the basis of privilege. What do you think happened to people who post negative "reviews"?

It has been open to the public for 6 months.

https://electrek.co/2022/11/24/tesla-full-self-driving-beta-...

Tesla has four modes of "self driving"--Autopilot, Enhanced Autopilot, FSD, FSD Beta.

AP/EAP will run red lights and can't merge lanes on a freeway. FSD will stop for lights/stop signs, but that's about it. FSD Beta is what Tesla is typically known for and what many YouTube videos are showing. FSD Beta will stop at red lights and merge into freeways. Most people use FSD interchangeably, but they are not the same thing.

> Tesla self-driving is better than a bad human driver.

Genuine question: what evidence is there of this?

I think Elon has a jump cut video of it somewhere

I mean I'd imagine the evidence being pretty simple, put someone that can't drive behind the wheel, boom, worse than tesla

Is it actually better than a bad human driver? (And what’s your metric for ‘bad’ — tired, drunk, distracted, a teenager who just got their license but didn’t actually practice enough?) Because I’ve watched enough videos of people having to quickly override Full Self-Driving in ordinary situations that I’m really skeptical that it’s better than most drivers. I’d be willing to say that in practice FSD usage is small enough to not be a serious threat to public safety, but I haven’t seen evidence that it’s better than a human.

Every time one of these threads come around I search youtube for a FSD video and qualitatively evaluate what comes up.

If you google FSD fail compilation, you'll get a FSD fail compilation. You can do the same for humans.

I think your parent’s question is completely justified by having anecdotes. They aren’t stating a fact, they are raising doubts of a claim. One does not need scientific evidence to raise doubts about a claim which it self has limited—and sometimes no—evidence behind it. Repeated real world examples are sufficient for such doubts.

Now if FSD proponents want to stop people from having doubts, they need to run several experiments in very diverse settings (as diverse as real world driving). In the absence of sufficient evidence, a skeptic is completely justified.

And if there's a video of FSD that isn't a "fail compilation", it was probably filmed and/or uploaded because it showed off the FSD doing well, and may even be subject to, effectively, the editorial review of google (whether via algorithms or moderators), which could easily depend on the size of google's advertising relationship with tesla on a given day (or how heavily they want to push the safety of self-driving cars, a business they are also in)

There's so much bias at every step of the process of looking up youtube videos that it lends essentially no credibility to any claim in any direction on this matter

> if there's a video of FSD that isn't a "fail compilation"

If? FSD drives a million miles a day. There are a few.

I think that was neither unclear from the sentence nor a particularly interesting detail to fixate on

> google's advertising relationship with tesla

Tesla spends $0 on advertising with Google.

I’m sure that’s true, but the premise of giving the responsibility to a machine is that it will consistently outperform humans. There should be less evidence available for FSD critics.

> If you google FSD fail compilation, you'll get a FSD fail compilation. You can do the same for humans.

Please continue this line of thought -

When I see a human fail video, where that person is an idiot, or drunk I conclude they shouldn't be driving. And usually their legal right to drive is taken away.

When I see FSD driving like a drunk idiot, I also conclude FSD shouldn't be driving. And their right to drive shouls also be taken away.

Lets treat them the same.

> Tesla self-driving is better than a bad human driver.

I have big doubts regarding this claim. I could not find any source that is not Tesla.

Given that TFA is about Tesla deceiving and hiding information from customers, do you have any source that isn't Tesla or Musk?

Can you be absolutely certain that self driving can deal safely with every possible road irregularities, obstacles, bad, incomplete, damaged or tampered road signs, and other unpredictable events? Self driving on public roads done right is damn hard; probably harder than sending a manned but completely automated spaceship to Mars and back.

Yeah, it's a hard problem, but researchers are smart

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRdUjrOnKdw

and human drivers do not set an infinitely high bar.

That's not the right question to ask. The right question to ask is, "Can self-driving tech kill fewer than 30,000 people a year, as humans do now?"

If you kill the R&D goose or smother it in overregulation, more people will die.

Or if the R&D phase kills so many people the public loses faith in the whole idea ... then you get to wait a generation for people to forget

R&D would have to be killing 30,000*%oftheirvehicles per year.

We're talking about perception. Regardless, Tesla won't release the data per mile driven and seems to be dodging reporting regulations -- if not daring regulators to respond.

Feels to me like amateurs (backed by a small army) confidently building bridges and daring the community to try and stop them. (Except Tesla's army are fan boys, lobbyists, and lawyers.) So basically speed running a millennium of civil engineering, except ignoring the more expensive safety controls; like LIDAR.

Why don't we see if anything like that happens before just assuming it will? The precautionary principle is a recipe for eternal stagnation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com