> You could be held liable if it impacts someone else. A restaurant serving improperly cooked chicken that gives people E Coli is liable. Private citizens may not have that duty, I’m not sure.
> You would likely also be liable if you overloaded an electrical cable, causing a fire that killed someone.
Right. But neither of these examples are following guidelines or proper use. If I turn the car into people on the pavement, I am responsible. If the steering wheel breaks and the car does it, then the manufacturer is responsible (or the mechanic, if the steering wheel was changed). The question at hand is whose responsibility it is if the car’s software does it.
> “Using it in the way it was intended” is largely circular reasoning; of course it wasn’t intended to hurt anyone, so any usage that does hurt someone was clearly unintended.
This is puzzling. You seem to be conflating use and consequences and I am not quite sure how you read that in what I wrote. Using a device normally should not make it kill people, I guess at least we can agree on that. Therefore, if a device kills people, then it is either improper use (and the fault of the user), or a defective device, at which point it is the fault of the designer or manufacturer (or whoever did the maintenance, as the case might be, but that’s irrelevant in this case).
Each device has a manual and a bunch of regulations about its expected behaviour and standard operating procedures. There is nothing circular about it.
> Not for the price it would cost.
Ok, if you want to go full pedantic, note that I wrote “want”, not “expect”.