Tesla driver arrested for homicide after running over motorcyclist on Autopilot

The driver is criminally liable to the estate of the young man he killed. Tesla may be liable for money damages to the driver they misled. (Maybe the estate also has a civil claim on Tesla if they can show its marketing was grossly negligent.)

This situation is the opposite of that, because multiple people were knowingly reckless.

Edit: By "multiple people" I mean the driver and Elon.

FSD is not Autopilot.

FSD does a pretty good job of pedestrian and cyclist identification. It’s supposed to.

Autopilot (which is what I use most)… I dunno… I’ve never had a problem in SF, LA, or Vegas.

We are just too primitive/traditional to understand.

Anyway, after 6 month health issue, I will literally laugh at people who think there is some value in enduring pain. Children.

Tesla and similar obviously are not pushing to take on that liability, courts/legislatures aren't particularly interested in putting that liability on the manufacturers. So that leaves the drivers to try and offload the liability from themselves.

Unfortunately drivers are not particularly well equipped to be pushing that liability off themselves so there it stays. Insurance companies are better equipped for that sort of thing but they're only interested in the financial liability. The criminal liability, is definitely not going anywhere anytime soon.

But, if the car literally didn't see a person in front of it (where reasonably a human would 99.9999% of the time) because it's cameras malfunctioned or the LLM read it as something else, then those cars should not be on the road.

I can certainly think of a time when I was driving when I missed another car in my blind spot and almost caused an accident, or when I saw someone in a car distracted by a toddler, or similar. Those didn't lead to accidents, but they might have if someone were less lucky.

There's a range of ways a car can kill people, ranging from driving through a red light at 100MPH, to an illegal U-turn, to making a stupid mistake, to a completely random fluke of circumstance.

On one end of the spectrum, there should be prison time, and regardless of whether an accident happens. On the other end, insurance should pay damages, but I'm not sure what good the criminal system can do in terms of deterrence.

If a driver is already doing their best to be safe, but slips up, or even isn't doing their best but isn't being unreasonable, criminal penalties don't seem like the right outcome.

Adopting Lidar would of course provide Tesla with higher-quality input for their self-driving model. But the quality of the input isn't the whole equation; you need to process it as well. In other words, adopting Lidar would incur costs not only on the hardware side, but also on the software side, which of course would result in more expensive cars. More expensive cars means less cars sold, and less cars sold means less data, which in turns means less input.

Does this result in a worse model? Again, I don't know, but I do know that the issue is more complicated (and not only because of the reasons I mentioned here) than many people seem to think.

Would be interesting to know how commonly this workaround is applied by Tesla owners. If this is common enough it seems like a case where a feature that's merely unreliable becomes a safety issue due to second-order effects. Echoes of Therac 25[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

People look at their phones while driving with and without autopilot.