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Comment by throwaway_ab | Hacker News Reader

Many people are saying Tesla FSD is far more advanced, and I've seen videos of A Tesla driving around LA for 2 hours completely autonomously so I agree Tesla FSD is the world leader by far and blows what Mercedes has built out of the water.

However Mercedes are taking liability whilst their system is in use which implies Tesla takes no liability whilst their system is in use.

I'm surprised Tesla is scared to take legal responsibility for their system and I am surprised lawmakers are allowing autonomous systems when the manufacturer doesn't believe in it enough to take responsibility whilst it's in use.

How is Tesla getting away with this?

Of course they can beat the competition especially if they do not need to take legal responsibility for any deaths/accidents that occur when it's in use.

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If I were Tesla why would I take responsibility for something no one is forcing me to take responsibility for? Lawmakers are responsible for this charade and its embarrassing to me that a company can be so misleading with marketing and get away with it.

Both state and capital can be bad at the same time y’know

I wouldn't do any business with you for example if that is your default level of ethics.

You say that, but it’s how most companies operate unfortunately.

> You say that, but it’s how most companies operate unfortunately.

Thank goodness you are incorrect.

Most people in business, like most people generally, are ethical human beings. Good to deal with, trust worthy and reliable.

That is my experience.

The sharks that rise to the top of billion dollar companies I only see in the news. My impression is that they are generally mentally disturbed (Elon Musk's "jokes" on Twitter about taking Tesla private is a case in point). But I hope that is a selection bias from the news cycle. Still waiting for the evidence....

Maybe "most companies" was the wrong choice of wording. How about "most large companies that actually influence the world?"

>Most people in business, like most people generally, are ethical human beings. Good to deal with, trust worthy and reliable.

It doesn't matter if the people you've anecdotally dealt with are ethical. It doesn't even matter if most of the people "in business" are ethical. The incentive structure to make the right choice for large public companies, or even venture-backed private ones just isn't there.

I wish I was incorrect, but I'm not. If I was, we wouldn't still have companies producing fossil fuels, animal agriculture, or surveillance capitalism.

OK then don't!

That's the magic of the market! People have different values.

It's not about me. This is exactly what Tesla is doing and for some reason no one seems to care and continues to hand Tesla money for subpar quality cars with fake FSD. I don't get it.

Because it means the feature is actually useful.

If the human "driver" is liable for what an autonomous car does, it means you have to watch the car like a hawk. At that point, may as well be driving.

> [...] blows what Mercedes has built out of the water.

Mercedes FSD prototype, 10 years ago: https://youtu.be/G5kJ_8JAp-w

In that video they mention doing localization based upon a prebuilt map of the route by matching images to the model 10 times per second.

That is by definition, not FSD. That is like the system announced today, a limited route autonomy.

For comparison, FSD v3 (they are shipping v4 in every vehicle now) performs localization 2,000 times per second based upon a hybrid model of every road in open street maps and a generalized model of roads. That is why it is FULL. Even if you are on an unmapped brand new road built yesterday, it will know how to drive appropriately.

They aren’t shipping v4 in the model 3, so no on the “every vehicle”

https://www.teslaoracle.com/2023/06/07/tesla-model-3-highlan...

That’s not shipping…

If you buy a model 3 TODAY you get V3

Not on the 3. But they are shipping it with the Model Y.

https://driveteslacanada.ca/news/tesla-now-shipping-model-y-...

So not “every vehicle” then?

Yeah that’s nowhere close. It’s easy to make a prototype that looks good in a marketing video while driving a very tightly mapped route. It’s a whole other thing to let anyone use self driving tech anywhere, especially on routes it has never seen before.

That was teen years ago, remember. All I can say is that these guys are extremely knowledgeable, kind and an absolute joy to work with. Big shout out to Eberhard, Carsten, Christoph, Clemens and Thao, and to the ones not appearing in the video, like Uwe (enjoy your retirement), David and Henning and a lot others from the chair of Christoph Stiller and from Mercedes research.

>Mercedes FSD prototype, 10 years ago:

Mercedes FSD prototype 1986 to 1994 via the 400 Million Euro EU funded Prometheus project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I39sxwYKlEE

It's funny that German, and Italian researchers and car makers had the early lead on self driving tech and then lost it by shelving the tech. Oof.

Which reinforces my earlier point I made in another thread here today, that innovation only happens in the EU as long as it's government funded and as soon as the funding stops, work stops and everything gets shelved instead of the private industry picking up the slack, funding it further to commercialize it like in the US. Sad.

“It’s possible that [Germany] threw away its clear vanguard role because research wasn’t consistently continued at the time,” Schmidhuber said. He added that carmakers might have shied away from self-driving technology because it seemed to be in opposition to their marketing, which promoted the idea of a driver in charge of steering a car."

> What do they have now?

> > Mercedes sprinter

I don't know why but that is hysterical.

Ernst Dickmanns. Legend. Sat close to him at a CVPR and he could not resist to rant about "How's that new? We did that in the 90es!" =:-D

>It's funny that German, and Italian researchers and car makers had the early lead on self driving tech and then lost it by shelving the tech. Oof.

Actually a very common occurrance. I don't think FSD on todays level was possible in '94 and the projects failure was inevitable unless it had been continously funded for at least 15 years more.

>innovation only happens in the EU as long as it's government funded and as soon as the funding stops

Seems like a bad example. Funding stopped because the technology didn't work.

The responsibility already isn't on the car occupants, it is on the occupants' insurance carrier. The only way to meaningfully diminish responsibility on the car occupants is to lower insurance premiums.

To that end, Tesla is offering insurance directly to consumers now, offering lower premiums based upon driver safety system utilization. In my case it would cut my insurance rates in half.

> However Mercedes are taking liability whilst their system is in use

Are they? This press release doesn't actually say so. There was an announcement a while back when they deployed this system in Germany, but that's obviously a different legal environment.

FWIW, this is mostly spin anyway. Liability isn't generally something that is granted, it's either there or not. If Tesla FSD causes an accident, they can absolutely be sued for that in the US. And they have been on a handful of occasions (Successfully even, I think? Pretty sure there were settlements in some of the early AP accidents?).

The reason that "Tesla is liable for accidents" doesn't make news is... that there are vanishingly few AP/FSD accidents. The system as deployed is safe, but that doesn't match people's priors so we end up in arguments like this about "accepting liability" instead of "it crashed".

[1] (2) (A) “Autonomous vehicle” means any vehicle equipped with autonomous technology that has been integrated into that vehicle that meets the definition of Level 3, Level 4, or Level 5

[2] (c) The manufacturer has in place and has provided the department with evidence of the manufacturer's ability to respond to a judgment or judgments for damages for personal injury, death, or property damage arising from the operation of autonomous vehicles on public roads

[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

[2] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/file/adopted-regulatory-text-p...

> FWIW, this is mostly spin anyway. Liability isn't generally something that is granted, it's either there or not.

Mercedes is releasing an L3 product in a jurisdiction where operation of L3 products is insured by the manufacturer. That is substantially different than "someone could sue them and maybe maybe maybe win"

> The reason that "Tesla is liable for accidents" doesn't make news is... that there are vanishingly few AP/FSD accidents.

There have been 736 known AP/FSD crashes and 17 deaths. The reason that "Tesla is liable for accidents" doesn't make news is that they aren't legally liable for their level 2 system under existing AV regulation.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/news/theres-been-a-whopping-...

Sorry, where do you get "accept liability" from "ability to respond to a judgement for damages"? That's not a requirement to pay, that just requires that the company have the ability to pay if they are found liable! It's the corporate equivalent of requiring liability insurance.

Show me the contract (or hell, even a press release) where Mercedes acknowledged accepting liability in the US. I really don't think this happened.

There were a ton of articles around 2022-03-20 (e.g., [1]) that had a line like this:

> Once you engage Drive Pilot, you are no longer legally liable for the car's operation until it disengages.

Not quite a press release but given that Mercedes never denied the claims it's pretty close. It'll be interesting to see how this is implemented legally, of course.

[1] https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a39481699/what-happens-if-...

That was a German product though. The press release about the american rollout is notably missing that language.

Hmm, the latest article [1] specifically about the California authorization says:

> When active, Mercedes takes responsibility for Drive Pilot's actions.

and

> "Mercedes-Benz Drive Pilot is the world's only SAE Level 3 system with internationally valid type approval," Mercedes CTO Markus Schäfer said in a statement.

Not as clear-cut as you'd want it to be but certainly leaning towards the claim. I guess we'll know for sure once the cars actually go on sale in California.

[1] https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a44139131/mercedes-benz-se...

Why are you quoting "accept liability" as if its something I actually said?

> Show me the contract (or hell, even a press release) where Mercedes acknowledged accepting liability in the US.

I'm not sure why this is the bar to clear, there is no reason Mercedes would want to potentially open themselves to more responsibility than the law requires. That said, it should be obvious to most people that Mercedes is taking some legal exposure when they:

1) call their product SAE L3 when SAE L3 is the legal definition of a vehicle where the operator doesn't have to pay attention under certain circumstances.

2) tell the user they can watch movies while driving! (no US manual available yet but they make a similar statement in the press release) https://moba.i.mercedes-benz.com/baix/cars/223.1_mbux_2021_a...

That very obviously speaks to their level of confidence in their system compared to something like FSD:

> It may do the wrong thing at the worst time, so you must always keep your hands on the wheel and pay extra attention on the road.

some legal analysis of US law on AV liability if you're interested: https://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/en/knowledge/publication...

> Liability isn't generally something that is granted, it's either there or not. If Tesla FSD causes an accident, they can absolutely be sued for that in the US.

That’s not what liability means here. Assuming the story is true, it means Mercedes is responsible for damages caused when the system is engaged and the users know that when they buy the car. Being sued afterwards is not the same thing.

> The reason that "Tesla is liable for accidents" doesn't make news is... that there are vanishingly few AP/FSD accidents.

Or because Tesla actively hides accident data by using suspect methodology and not following regulations about disclosure.

Just a couple of days ago there was a user report of FSD hitting and killing a dog: https://twitter.com/TeslaUberRide/status/1666860361381818384...

Unsurprisingly, it won’t show up in any of the stats Tesla publishes in their two-paragraph “safety report”. That’s because they don’t consider any contact that doesn’t deploy airbags to be an accident. There are plenty of reports like this that are not being counted.

Not to mention, Tesla is openly violating at least CA DMV regulations that require reporting of all disengagements and contact events.

> Not to mention, Tesla is openly violating at least CA DMV regulations that require reporting of all disengagements and contact events.

Tesla letters to CA DMV claim they don't participate because their system isn't a self-driving system. Which is fine, other than they're telling customers it is at the same time.

A word's meaning is a specific legal document can be different than a word's meaning in a product's marketing material.

Can. It can also be the same.

Yes, because an accident is when there are personal injuries, otherwise it’s a collision.

I’m not aware of any definition of accident that says personal injuries have to occur. But sure, you can replace accident here with collision or contact events. Also, airbag deployment doesn’t automatically mean there are injuries either.

Point is these types of events are not being reported by Tesla, while every other company testing self driving technology (specially ones that have CA DMV permit to do so) are reporting them.

Mercedes could also ship their own L2 AutoPilot without having to take legal responsibility. Their customers would love it as much as Tesla drivers love theirs.

The thing is, they just aren’t capable of it.

Or Mercedes has certain reputation to maintain. This is not a dig at Tesla, but Mercedes not shipping L2 AP doesn't imply they aren't capable of it.

Mercedes has been shipping their L2 system since 2013, at least in Europe.

Huh? The L2 system on my 2022 Mercedes works just fine. And I'm sure that's not the first model year where it was present.

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