Tesla settles with family who said Autopilot caused his fatal crash | Hacker News Reader

Tesla settles with family who said Autopilot caused his fatal crash

cnn.com

17 pointsmandeepj7 comments

That's interesting, because in 2022 Musk claimed that Tesla will never settle an unjust case against them, even if they could lose it.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1527749734668050433

So what does this tells us (again) about Tesla misleading marketing ?

What does it tell us? In most accidents there is shared fault.

In this case, the guy was playing a game on his cellphone, no hands on the wheel.

The city also hadn't replaced the safety barrier after numerous past crashes so the life-saving crumple-zone was used up.

Tesla's FSD was engaged and made a very significant mistake.

I'd say all three parties are to blame. If any one of those factors were missing, this likely would not have been fatal.

Tesla paid out because FSD abruptly steered him out of the lane and into the barrier.

We don't know if he played games. Some person declared that he did. There is a way to collect evidence from phones and it's not "let's find an apple engineer who will make a deposition." In fact, if he really played games Tesla would make sure that it can be submitted as evidence in this court so it's more likely he did not.

A great citation showing how Tesla does not actually care about safety. After all, Elon just turns off safety (elon mode) when he tests the car.

Last week [1] Tesla notably got an Apple Engineer (named "James Harding" though that online profile seems to be gone now) to file a court declaration claiming there was evidence on the phone that the deceased driver was playing games. The action was notable because discovery had already closed and the declaration was not a deposition or anything.

This a notable detail that the linked CNN article neglects. E.g. the statement from "James Harding" likely pushed things in Tesla's favor, the statement could even have perhaps been fabricated (and/or it would have been prohibitively expensive to fairly interrogate the new evidence), and "James Harding" is likely absent from the settlement and could now be liable personally (resulting in a new lawsuit that won't be covered in the news).

Whether the driver was playing games or not, this case's outcome underscores Tesla's aggressively litigious behavior, which contrasts sharply with the issue of real highway safety. What if everybody could enable "Elon Mode" ( https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-trouble-elon-mode ) and just turn off safety features?

[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/04/04/tesla-wants-apple...

> The family is unhappy about a decision by Tesla to submit a declaration from Apple engineer James Harding, stating that Apple had determined Huang was actively playing a game at the time of the crash.

> Furthermore, Tesla and Apple are accused of "trying to circumvent the discovery process" by using Harding's word as testimony instead of a deposition. The deposition is also submitted five months after the end of the discovery period, which meant that the family's lawyers couldn't question Harding before the trial itself.

> The lawyers have subpoenaed Apple for more information about the declaration. Apple responded in March that the lawyers were seeking "a substantial volume of Apple's privileged material."

I'm surprised between the spying of Tesla and the spying of Apple, that they don't have recordings of the entire incident.

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