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Comment by billy99k | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that it's not a person driving, it's a vehicle that's property of a company. If that vehicle kills someone, the company is responsible. Who goes to prison? The company owners? CEO? Vehicle engineer(s)?

update: I see we have some Waymo engineers in the house!!!!!!! (which is why I'm getting downvoted)

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For better or worse, we generally don’t imprison anyone when machines fail unless there’s evidence of gross negligence or incompetence. See space shuttle disasters, collapsing bridges, train derailments, building collapses etc etc. It’s possible that there should be some jail time because it’s hard often to assess whether it’s a cultural issue (management), a team-specific issue, or an individual issue. That’s why post mortems that are blameless are the best ones - it documents the failure and what changes should be enacted as a result.

We already barely punish drivers for killing people (compared to other people who produce deadly outcomes by taking comparable risks). Society seems to have already decided that cars are worth sacrificing a couple lives every now and then.

And if a company is found to produce cars that kill an unexpected number of people we already have criminal laws to deal with it. These are hardly the first heavy machines we build. Even on normal cars you already have this issue with stuck pedals, engines that might not turn off and similar manufacturing defects.

In the instance of *Tempe, uber was almost criminally liable, but the safty driver took the fall:

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/03/arizona-prosecutor-wont...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg#Legal...

Tempe, not phoenix. Also that one was tough because the pedestrian was pushing a bicycle across a four lane road at night and not at an intersection or crosswalk. How many human drivers would have hit her also? I’m surprised the backup driver got charged at all in this case, if they were driving the car themselves and the same accident occurred without any tech at all, it would have probably been a non-interesting case of jaywalking gone wrong and the driver might not have even been cited.

No, you're getting downvoted because you raise a point that's negative and tangential to what's being discussed, which is a potencial 90%+ reduction in crashes, and therefore injuries and fatalities.

As someone who has lost close ones to car accidents, I don't give a shit about liability if we reduce casualties by an order of magnitude. I didn't downvote you but it doesn't surprise me that your take is unpopular.

Surely this is settled law? I would have thought cars crash due to mechanical fault quite often.

People die in industrial accidents all the time and nobody is responsible. Minor fines that it

> The problem is that it's not a person driving, it's a vehicle that's property of a company. If that vehicle kills someone, the company is responsible. Who goes to prison?

If a car causes injury or death or property damage due to a manufacturing defect, then there is chain-of-commerce liability for everyone between the manufacturer and the buyer, most jurisdictions make the operator responsible for assuring it is maintained in safe condition as well. And none of these liabilities excluded the others.

But, no, usually, unless there is an unusual degree of intentionaloty and/or deception, no one will go to prison.

Surely no different than if some company's cars have commonly failing brakes causing people to kill other people. The brake failures will eventually show up in NHTSA data and the company will be responsible.

If the process of this company's brakes failing reaches a sufficient degree of negligence, those people will go to jail.

However the process can take some time. For instance, only a couple of people were sent to jail for Volkswagen's fraud since Germany protects its own for the most part. One of them was jailed when the US grabbed him in Florida while he was trying to return to Germany from being on vacation.

I don't think anyone goes to prison for most actual accidents, whether automotive or industrial. There would need to be deliberate negligence for that.

If you kill someone. Intentional or not, you will most likely serve jail time. are you telling me that if all vehicles were driver-less, there would cease to be any sort of jail time for any death-related to an accident?

> If you kill someone. Intentional or not, you will most likely serve jail time.

Is this true? My admittedly small data sample suggests it isn't.

This is categorically false. The VAST majority of automobile accidents that result in deaths, even though drivers were at fault do not result in jail time. Even a large part of DUIs that result in deaths only result in community service and probation.

Source: idk

We'll fine them to oblivion! They will need to pay at least 15k USD per person killed!!

Probably the human behind the wheel that failed to properly act as a line of defense against faulty computer decision making. We don't send Boeing engineers to jail when autopilot crashes a plane.

Edit: I am wrong Ill take the L

It...is a driverless car.

"Probably the human behind the wheel that failed to properly act as a line of defense against faulty computer decision making. We don't send Boeing engineers to jail when autopilot crashes a plane"

But most airplanes still have pilots. We are talking about cars with no drivers.

In most plane crashes, nobody is sent to jail.

..Because they're dead.

Or Boeing executives.

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