Tesla braces for its first trial involving Autopilot fatality

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-braces-its-first-trial-involving-autopilot-fatality-2023-08-28/

by Bender • 3 years ago

148 232 3 years ago

reuters.com

baz002• 3 years ago

"There are no self-driving cars on the road today," the company said.

Amazing that they charge for it then?

malfist• 3 years ago

Look, they only call it "Full self drive" you can't expect it to fully self drive the vehicle.

InitialLastName• 3 years ago

They call it that because you have to drive it fully by yourself.

rwmj• 3 years ago

Is it normal for these cases to take 4 years to reach trial?

rootusrootus6• 3 years ago

If you have deep enough pockets and you're worried the verdict is going to be very expensive and probably not in your favor, there are lots of ways to stall the forward progress of the trial.

rsynnott5• 3 years ago

Not abnormal. The J&J asbestos thing has been grinding on for, at least, a decade, say.

sigmoid103• 3 years ago

Tesla self driving is only level 2 and they explicitly say that the driver must be fully attentive and have hands on the wheel at all times. So no matter how the courts rule here, it'll be about wording at best. A much more interesting case will come once Mercedes produces its inevitable first fatality with their level 3 system. Rather unlikely for now due to lots of factors (only works up to 40km/h, only on certain roads and much fewer cars sold), but this will set the stage for how far manufacturer liability actually goes for self driving.

Robotbeat• 3 years ago

Why is this comment downvoted?

It’s pointing out correctly that the Mercedes system is the only one that allows you to take your hands off the wheel.

Death is inevitable in literally any system, the point is to lower the death probability to well below human drivers.

rootusrootus6• 3 years ago

Why is this comment downvoted?

Probably because the first sentence tries to say that 'full self driving' does not mean 'full self driving.'

paxys7• 3 years ago

So no matter how the courts rule here, it'll be about wording at best.

That describes just about every civil court case in the world. The law is all about interpreting the meaning of words. Whether Tesla misled consumers into thinking their car could do more than it was capable of is a very important ruling, and will set a strong precedent for the entire self driving industry.

sigmoid103• 3 years ago

Misleading marketing is not new and no matter the ruling it will have little to no impact on actual future self driving liabilities.

mholt2• 3 years ago

Is this about Autopilot or Full Self Driving? The article is talking about accidents in 2019. But then it says:

Self-driving capability is central to Tesla’s financial future, according to Musk, whose own reputation as an engineering leader is being challenged with allegations by plaintiffs in one of two lawsuits that he personally leads the group behind technology that failed. Wins by Tesla could raise confidence and sales for the software, which costs up to $15,000 per vehicle.

The $15k software is Full Self Driving, which is still in beta and has very clear customer warnings and consent screens before using.

But the initial versions of this beta software wasn't even released for consumers until October 2020, a year after the crashes.

baz002• 3 years ago

The context depends on if it's the PR and legal team talking or Musk's mouth flapping.

AlexandrB2• 3 years ago

Is there a PR team? I thought Musk companies typically have Musk as sole PR.

mcpackieh4• 3 years ago

The $15k software is Full Self Driving, which is still in beta and has very clear customer warnings and consent screens before using.

The price makes this so much worse. If it were free and plastered in warnings, people probably wouldn't trust it. But because people first pay $15k for it, they now have 15 thousand reasons to want it to work and want to trust it. Paying for it creates a strong cognitive bias for disregarding any warning.

Mizoguchi• 3 years ago

First buyers I believe got autopilot for free in some versions (I know for sure the X owners did) as well as unlimited charging. Still even those who paid for it, $15K isn't a fortune for everyone, particularly those throwing $80-100K on a car.

shkkmo2• 3 years ago

Both accidents happened prior to the release of FSD so were using Enhanced Autopilot. However, in 2019 Tesla had stopped selling the EA add-on and only sold FSD. They started selling EA again in 2022.

The claimants here could well have bought a FSD package even though they only got access to EA features. Either way, a loss here that shows Tesla knowingly lied about safety features or negligently didn't fix known problems would probably hurt FSD sales, even of the specific judgement only relates to EA.

CamelCaseName• 3 years ago

I hope Elon is personally held responsible for this death.

It is crystal clear that Autopilot, Full Self Driving, and other marketing terms are deceptive and dangerous, yet led countless people to spend five figures each enriching the now wealthiest person.

wahnfrieden3• 3 years ago

It will result in a one-off tax on their operation

tenpies• 3 years ago

Musk-aside, I really want someone looking into what happened with the regulators. Yes, plural. From the FTC for allowing the marketing claims, to the NHTSA for allowing it on roads, plus whoever I may be missing.

There has to have been some financial incentive for key regulatory personnel to look the other way so frequently. I don't mean Elon dropping off bags of cash, I mean something as simple as them having Tesla shares, but not being forced to disclose this or recuse themselves from any decision or case relating to Tesla.

paxys7• 3 years ago

Even in the worst case the liability falls on Tesla, not Musk.

Zetice• 3 years ago

Teslas marketing has been in direct conflict with its capabilities, and hopefully they’ll get smacked down hard enough to stop being reckless with what they claim vs. what they disclaim later on.

It’s called Full Self Driving. That matters, even if they clarify in the fine print.

mholt2• 3 years ago

FSD wasn't released until the year after these crashes.

shkkmo2• 3 years ago

Tesla has been reckless with their self driving claims and safety for far longer than FSD has been available to the public. The suggestion here is that getting hit for those earlier reckless claims might hopefully get them to be less deceptive going forward.

stetrain3• 3 years ago

They've been taking money for a packaged called "Full Self Driving" since 2016.

agloe_dreams2• 3 years ago

That won't happen. Tesla is in a complex legal situation where a reaction twoards it also means a reaction towards spaceX and twitter, both of which have parts of the US government happy with.

ProjectArcturis2• 3 years ago

Do you really think the judge and jury in this trial are going to be worried about the federal government's relationship with SpaceX and Twitter?

rsynnott5• 3 years ago

… Wait, how does this work? Regulator slaps down a company for dodgy advertising, which… somehow has a negative impact on two unrelated companies? It’s (a) not clear to me what the mechanism of action is here and (b) unclear why a regulator should care even if there was one.

Note that even in cases where the company being punished was the company that governments cared about, regulators usually aren’t too shy about this. US and European governments are big Microsoft customers, say, but both US and EU regulators have punished MS for bad behaviour in the past (and, particularly in the EU case, forced it to change aspects of its business practices).

thebruce87m6• 3 years ago

the Autopilot system caused owner Micah Lee’s Model 3 to suddenly veer off a highway east of Los Angeles at 65 miles per hour, strike a palm tree and burst into flames, all in the span of seconds.

I only use Autopilot on motorways in the UK because I don’t trust it on single carriageways. Even on motorways roadworks can scar the carriageway in such a way that temporary lines are still visible after the works are visible. With the right lighting I definitely see things that would confuse a vision only system. Scary stuff.

The 2019 crash, which has not been previously reported, killed Lee and seriously injured his two passengers, including a then-8-year old boy who was disemboweled.

This hit home really hard. My son is 7.

boudin• 3 years ago

Honest question, do you feel you can safely take back the control of the car when driving on a motorway if the "auto pilot" feature take a random decision you cannot predict?

thebruce87m6• 3 years ago

Yes, once you apply enough force to the steering it disengages.

Annoyingly, to prove you are in control you must apply slight pressure on the steering wheel. I say annoyingly since it sometimes doesn’t register and you have to give more, which is counterintuitive if it is doing the right thing.

On single carriageways this is worse since you are effectively trying to steer the car into oncoming traffic or off the road to prove that you are watching. That’s one more reason I don’t use it on these types of roads.

All-in, it’s not really worth it tbh, and this is just the basic autopilot.

pc863• 3 years ago

Not the GP but empirically you can't unless you get rid of the majority of FSD's benefit. You'd need to already have both hands on the wheel, have a foot over the pedals, and be paying as much attention as if you were driving - likely more - to see things start to go haywire in that first split second. And, pray that your reaction time is better than whatever FSD is going to try to do.

Maybe that's how you're "supposed" to use FSD but realistically nobody does that. Teslas are not super common in my area but I have one friend who has one with Autopilot and uses it on his ~35 minute highway commute to work. He reads his email on his laptop next to him and doesn't look up at the road until his car gets off the highway. That's how 99% of people will use this.

jonhohle• 3 years ago

It’s not just autopilot of even FSD with issues like this, though. I have a 2021 Kia and Toyota that like to aggressively brake at odd times a few times a year. It just happened again in the past week in the Kia. Going 70+MPH and having the brakes suddenly and unexpectedly applied while going around a corner is jarring regardless of how fast you take back control.

My hypothesis for the Kia is that direct sun on corners at speed might affect the vision and/or collision system[0].

Is an infrequent jolt a reasonable trade off for the benefits? As an experienced driver o think so, but would my kids be able to handle it when the learn to drive?

0 - https://www.kia.com/content/dam/kia2/in/en/content/ev6-manua...

flutas• 3 years ago

With the right lighting I definitely see things that would confuse a vision only system. Scary stuff.

Have you used the system in these situations?

There's been a ton of construction on the freeway (motorway) near me that's left several visible lane lines, and the car has always been dead set on the actual lane somehow. It still drives (acceleration, steering) like a drunk 10 year old going to the gas station for a Slurpee, but the actual lane recognition aspect of it has been impressive to me.

thebruce87m6• 3 years ago

There have been a few times I’ve wrestled the car on the motorway for various reasons. I’m not sure what it would have really done, but it was starting to do things I didn’t like so I took over.

steveBK1232• 3 years ago

drives (acceleration, steering) like a drunk 10 year old going to the gas station for a Slurpee

Pretty good description from my experience as an owner for 4 years. It also had so much variability in behavior and regressions. Sometimes it would be incredible and maintain lane even in confusing poorly marked lane lines. Other times it would panic alert at every HOV on/off ramp for a 30 mile drive. Sometimes both of these things in the same drive!

jprete2• 3 years ago

I had to look this up: Motorways in the UK have hard shoulders, and several categories of traffic are not allowed: learners, slow vehicles, pedestrians, and bicycles. They typically do not have traffic lights and the right (innermost) lane is only for passing.

thebruce87m6• 3 years ago

Yes, basically at least one lane either side of you in normal driving unless someone is overtaking, or you are. I like the extra reaction time this gives.

sschueller• 3 years ago

Elon posted a 44 minute live video of self-driving. In it the car tries to run a red light in the most clear situation possible: https://twitter.com/RealDanODowd/status/1695268712910348471

The excuse is that this firmware version is not available to the public. Yet Elon is driving in public with other drivers putting everyone at risk of death. At what point are we going to stop this lunacy?

bboygravity• 3 years ago

I'll still take Tesla FSD over the average earthling driver any day.

That video does nothing to change that. Why should it?

rhino369• 3 years ago

What evidence exists that Tesla FSD is actually safer than an average driver?

paxys7• 3 years ago

How many "average" drivers do you run into every day that accelerate into cross traffic on a red light?

mcpackieh4• 3 years ago

If you think a typical random 44 minutes of the average person driving includes an attempted running of a red light, you're out of it. If most people drove like this all the time, the average car driver would already be six feet under. Telsa leans on this sort of extreme misanthropy to pitch their product as a better alternative. Tesla FSD drives worse than a drunk teenager, let alone a normal person on a normal day.

Inb4 the bicycle crowd arrives to tell me that the average car driver commits 50 felonies a minute.

robin_reala• 3 years ago

When you say earthling are you restricting it to US citizens? Because the US driving test is firmly middle of the pack.

anonymousab2• 3 years ago

I'll still take Tesla FSD over the average earthling driver any day

Sure. As long as Tesla itself, the company and its leaders and its shareholders, are held personally liable for any major autopilot or FSD fuckups.

Be it a monetary ticket or time in jail, have them all serve that responsibility each and every time. And if a long stint in "jail" - i.e. not being able the conduct business of any kind for that period - is too traumatic for the company to survive, then maybe they'd rethink their level of recklessness.

And certainly, if I'm in any sort of roadside screwup nearly regardless of fault, my insurance rates are going up a lot, for a long time. So too should that be the case for Tesla and their products whenever and wherever their software makes a decision that is involved in or the cause of the same.

matthewdgreen2• 3 years ago

You should not. I have Tesla FSD and without constant monitoring by a very cautious human driver it is a murder machine. The choice is not “human vs. Tesla” it is “human vs. dangerous Tesla mitigated by humans of varying degrees of competence.”

thworp• 3 years ago

No you wouldn't. The average human driver is vastly safer than Autopilot. I will agree that autopilot is better than the worst 10% of drivers and maybe on par with the worst 20%. That group causes most accidents and almost all severe accidents. The average human driver drives something like 200,000 miles without any accidents.

edit: Upon looking up some stats I might have misremembered, in any case the median human drivers is definitely vastly safer than Autopilot.

tantalor5• 3 years ago

"this model has a small regression in the traffic lights"

lol, if you knew about it, then why is it on the road?

Karunamon3• 3 years ago

Because testing this stuff in the real world is the only way. The human in the loop did exactly what they were supposed to do.

userbinator• 3 years ago

Yet Elon is driving

Is he really driving if he isn't actually in control most of the time?

ra73• 3 years ago

If he is in the driver's seat ready to intervene if something goes wrong, then he is in control.

jprete2• 3 years ago

For what it’s worth, at least this is the kind of brain fart screwup a novice driver would actually do. “Hmm, I was looking at the radio, that guy next to me is moving, I can’t quite see the light, it must be green.”

(Source: I think I did do this once or twice.)

holmesworcester2• 3 years ago

It's funny to think that the cause of the bug could have been this actual mistake by actual humans sneaking through into their training data.

One of the things they talk about in the video is the hoops they had to jump through to get the car to make a complete stop at stop signs, since almost no human drivers actually do that.

jacamera• 3 years ago

Is there any mistake that a self-driving car could make that a novice (or any) human driver couldn't? I fail to see how this line of reasoning is relevant at all.

lolinder7• 3 years ago

I'm one of the more vocal Tesla critics on here, but I think we can do better than this example.

The left turn arrow turned green, the car inched forward a little, and Elon immediately put on the brakes. The situation was no more dangerous than when a human driver mistakes which light is theirs and does the same thing, which happens pretty regularly in my experience.

And that this is a test version of the software isn't irrelevant, it makes a huge difference—I am much less opposed to internal company testers who know what they're doing than I am to a public beta in the hands of people who believe Tesla's (really egregious) marketing.

causi• 3 years ago

I am much less opposed to internal company testers who know what they're doing than I am to a public beta in the hands of people who believe Tesla's (really egregious) marketing

Which category do you think Elon Musk is more likely to belong to?

echelon2• 3 years ago

The fervor over this is unwarranted.

When cars first debuted, they were incredibly dangerous and killed lots of people. Yet we persisted.

Airplanes, too.

Fully autonomous cars are on the streets of San Francisco. They run into trouble, yet the experiment persists.

We should allow for civil suits, especially when negligence is found, but the only way to progress forward is to make real world attempts.

The promise of autonomous driving is worth trillions of dollars for all of the opportunity it will unlock. And as macabre as it may be, there will continue to be deaths along that development path.

rxhernandez2• 3 years ago

And that this is a test version of the software isn't irrelevant, it makes a huge difference—I am much less opposed to internal company testers who know what they're doing than I am to a public beta in the hands of people who believe Tesla's (really egregious) marketing.

There is absolutely no reason you should assume "testers" know what they are doing. I have met plenty of people with decades of experience in "testing" barely know what they are doing. Even in the case they know what they are doing, they shouldn't be testing a *deadly* vehicle with potentially broken software on heavily populated *public* roads.

jjoonathan7• 3 years ago

They seem to be serious about attentiveness monitoring and strikes.

No more weights: https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/zv5xp9/a_warni...

How strikes work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otknSUQ4ICY

dataflow3• 3 years ago

the car inched forward

It felt like more than a few inches. (I'm not splitting hairs here, I really do feel it was qualitatively significantly different from your description, which made it sound like the car was cautiously starting to move just a bit.)

and Elon immediately put on the brakes. The situation was no more dangerous than when a human driver mistakes which light is theirs and does the same thing, which happens pretty regularly in my experience.

When humans make this mistake, they stop the car themselves. When this car made this mistake, someone else (Elon) had to stop it. These are not equivalent. In the former case you can argue no accident was going to happen, but in the latter you can't.

that this is a test version of the software isn't irrelevant, it makes a huge difference—I am much less opposed to internal company testers who know what they're doing

This is on a public road. Try pulling this off (well, please don't) in medicine and see how it goes.

whoknew11223• 3 years ago

I still don't understand how some people think it's reasonable that car malfunctions are hand waved away as "it's a beta." We're not talking about an Early Access game on Steam here. We're talking about death machines that weight thousands of pounds.

Beta software shouldn't be on the road where other people can be impacted by it. Want to run into the back of a fire truck? Fine by me. Just do it on a track (and record it). I'll laugh from my computer chair rather than being potentially exposed to it on the road.

ryandrake• 3 years ago

Critically defective products routinely get handwaved away here with “Well, software has bugs, what can ya do?” As if that’s some law of physics.

jjoonathan7• 3 years ago

Does Steam Early Access require an always-on camera that tracks your eye movement, warns if you look away, and locks you out if you ignore the warnings?

saberience4• 3 years ago

Stop what lunacy? You realize thousands upon thousands of Americans are driving drunk every day? Or drive watching TikTok videos on their phone. How many car accidents do you think happen every week because humans are drunk or distracted?

Elon had his hands on the steering wheel ready to make any intervention, this is hardly some crazy and dangerous testing going on. I would be far more worried about the average American driver than Elon testing the latest version of FSD.

I’ve had an incident where a crazy guy fully stopped his car on the I5 fast-lane to LA trying to brake test me before getting out of his car to threaten me. I’m far more scared of people than I am of software.

toomuchtodo• 3 years ago

Lots of excuses in this thread for the average humans (which is objectively low quality), but not the software that is actively improving. This is why we can’t have nice things.

(have lost friends to both drunk and distracted drivers)

Veserv10• 3 years ago

What? Elon was literally filming with the phone he was holding. He did not have his “hands on steering wheel ready to make any intervention”.

brandonagr23• 3 years ago

Everyone alive everywhere is always at risk of death at anytime, your statement has no meaning.

Are you trying to imply that a human driver monitoring a self driving system is somehow increasing the risk to others when its actually decreasing risk?

paxys7• 3 years ago

A human driver 100% focused and ready to take over while an AI drives > a human driver 100% focused on the road driving by themselves >>>> a human driver who should be focused but trusts the AI and will not react in time if it messes up.

The question is what % of drivers will fall under 1 vs 3?

fasteddie31003• 3 years ago

As someone who has FSD Beta, the improvements lately have been amazing. Driving my other non-FSD car is getting more and more annoying.

If you extrapolate out the progress to around 5 years I see a world that has car insurance companies giving you a huge discount to use self driving. Maybe insurance companies will have a lower deductible while having a crash during self driving vs a high deductible during manual driving.

I see FSD getting so good in 10 years the government would mandate it because it would eliminate a good portion of the 40k traffic deaths a year.

wilde• 3 years ago

I hope Tesla pays lots in damages and then keeps improving their systems. If they’re truly below the rate of human error when segmented by scenario there’s no reason for a ban.

I also wish they’d knock it off with purposefully misleading marketing. They have a decent product but for whatever reason their CEO feels like compulsively lying about it.

snapcaster• 3 years ago

I'm not a lawyer and not well versed on the technical legal details of this, but it feels like if Tesla doesn't face some kind of consequences for marketing Full Self Driving but then saying "oh actually it's not if something bad happens" is so shameful and so bullshitty i'll be very discouraged

dangus• 3 years ago

Something I’m not seeing yet in these comments is a discussion of the other automakers’ implementation of the same features.

Nearly every other luxury automaker has an automatic steering and lane change feature as well.

I think that other automakers will be hit with similar lawsuits regardless of what the driver assist system is called, because it will be easy to argue that the driver assistance systems assume some percentage of responsibility while active, and because you don’t have to win a lawsuit to reach a favorable settlement.

Tesla may pay out more than other automakers due to its optimistic marketing.

redox995• 3 years ago

Something I’m not seeing yet in these comments is a discussion of the other automakers’ implementation of the same features.

Because these threads always become Tesla hate instead of an objective analysis.

All of these lane centering ADAS (including Autopilot) will kill you if you leave them unattended long enough (usually by taking a tight off-ramp at an unsafe speed). These is very evident to people who actually use these systems.

And there's nothing wrong with such behavior, it's an L2 system. Cruise Control will also kill you. These systems have been on the road for a long while and people aren't dying left and right because of it, they are empirically reasonably safe. They're probably a net positive as they likely drastically reduce rear ends.

People just get riled up at one off accidents because they make the news.

r00fus• 3 years ago

"Safe" isn't a binary. They could be extremely risky to use in specific known or unknown use-cases.

onlyrealcuzzo2• 3 years ago

Nearly every other luxury automaker has an automatic steering and lane change feature as well.

Are they calling smart cruise control "Full self driving" and "Autopilot"?

Smart cruise control has existed for a while now, and it is not regularly veering off course and slamming into palm trees & fire trucks.

Full self driving Teslas - according to Tesla - do not actually exist - and yet they sell & market them and have the outcomes that they do.

And then they have the balls to lie and say the system wasn't engaged - and tell everyone to keep using Full Self Driving Autopilot as normal.

redox995• 3 years ago

What's wrong with Autopilot? It's a very good analogy to autopilot in airplanes.

rsynnott5• 3 years ago

optimistic marketing

That’s… one term for it.

mrkeen2• 3 years ago

I think the following excerpts make a nice juxtaposition:

the Autopilot system caused owner Micah Lee’s Model 3 to suddenly veer off a highway east of Los Angeles at 65 miles per hour, strike a palm tree and burst into flames, all in the span of seconds. The 2019 crash, which has not been previously reported, killed Lee and seriously injured his two passengers, including a then-8-year old boy who was disemboweled.
Wins by Tesla could raise confidence and sales for the software, which costs up to $15,000 per vehicle.

frob2• 3 years ago

A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The FSD confuses a firetruck for an empty lane and drive full-speed into the back of it. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we stop taking money for FSD? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the windfall we get for selling people something called "Full Self-Driving" that isn’t actually self-driving, we keep taking money for it.

mrkeen2• 3 years ago

I don't dispute the calculus there, but that's not quite what I read in the passage from the article.

In this case it's the consumer that's made to look ridiculous:-

You can buy the car and get wrapped around a tree. But if the courts don't think Musk should pay you damages for that, then somehow you're more likely to buy the car.

SpicyLemonZest• 3 years ago

Well, another important piece of the puzzle is

the company has argued that Lee consumed alcohol before getting behind the wheel and that it is not clear whether Autopilot was on at the time of crash.

Given that this case hasn’t been previously reported, I don’t think anyone can claim to know that Tesla’s version of the story is false. Presumably if they’re confident in it, Tesla won’t agree to a last minute settlement, and we’ll see what evidence comes out in the trial.

rsynnott5• 3 years ago

Wins by Tesla could raise confidence and sales for the software, which costs up to $15,000 per vehicle.

If anything I would expect the opposite; if the manufacturer were found liable in a few of these cases but continued to sell the thing, that would make it a more attractive product (Mercedes has a limited self-driving thing where they take some responsibility up-front, say).

miroljub2• 3 years ago

Self-driving cars are just a dream.

It will just not happen as long as self-driving cars and humans share the same roads. AI will never be better at avoiding a playing child who accidentally stepped on the road as an average human driver.

If we want self-driving cars to become a reality, we should instead make separate roads, and let the drive there. Some analogue to railroads, that are used exclusively by trains.

myrmidon2• 3 years ago

AI will never be better at avoiding a playing child who accidentally stepped on the road as an average human driver.

What makes you so confident?

I'd argue for the reverse-- there is absolutely no way that humans are able to compete long term, because human reaction time and focus/attention is inherently limited-- as soon as computer vision starts to outperform, humans will NEVER become competitively safe drivers again (could be 5 years, could be 50, who knows, but this seems EXCLUSIVELY a matter of time, especially considering the progress we made in the last decades).

miroljub2• 3 years ago

You misunderstood my point. I'm not saying that humans are always "better", just that humans are better in mixed environment. In controlled roads without humans, AI can be clearly better even today.

Closi• 3 years ago

AI will never be better at avoiding a playing child who accidentally stepped on the road as an average human driver.

Very hard to predict what will be possible with AI in 10 years time, but I wouldn’t bet on humans here.

Humans have a number of disadvantages compared to an AI agent in this scenario - they look at phones, get tired, technically have slower response times…

And then AI has seen tremendous advancement in the last 3 years with it basically smashing a load of tasks that were thought to be entirely ‘non-automatable’ by many people.

Plus think about what has been achieved in the self driving space in the last 10 years and then imagine what can be done in the next 20. It’s probably not a 1-2 year thing (imo), it’s probably a 10-20 year thing (but again totally unpredictable! Maybe 5 maybe 50!).

And self-driving without operating cooperating alongside human drivers just won’t happen from an infrastructure perspective.

saberience4• 3 years ago

I think this is destined to be one of those comments which we will look back on in a few years and smile at its naivety.

rootusrootus6• 3 years ago

If by a few years you mean 50, sure.

tim333• 3 years ago

I'm not sure you have to wait a few years. There is a certain something about saying self driving cars are future dream when they are working for real 24/7 in SF.

z7• 3 years ago

Self-driving cars are just a dream. It will just not happen as long as self-driving cars and humans share the same roads.

"On Monday, Waymo began letting the public pay for rides in its driverless cars in San Francisco."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/21/technology/waymo-driverle...

paxys7• 3 years ago

Never say never, but I do agree that developing self driving AI by teaching it to mimic human drivers on regular roads vs building a fully closed system and slowing expanding it was a mistake.

Had the problem been tackled more intelligently we could have had closed off "self driving lanes" or entire thoroughfares in major cities with advanced sensors built-in and no interaction with humans at all. Considering how many hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested into the problem, we would definitely have had more to show for it by now.

frob2• 3 years ago

"There are no self-driving cars on the road today," the company said.

Says the company that makes a product literally called "Full Self-Driving." What a bunch of fucking lowlife charlatans. I surprised they didn't sign it with a smiling poop emoji.

throw7• 3 years ago

Until liability is on the manufacturer, I'm really not interested in self-driving cars.

Currently, when you use "self-driving", you need to pay more attention not less, because the system adds an additional unpredictability calculation to your driving, that you wouldn't have if you were just driving in the first place.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have a car I could tell to go the shop and get serviced. Or come to the airport to pick me up. Do I think that could happen? Maybe sooner with infrastructure support (but that'll be expensive), so realistically I'm pessimistic.

neilv• 3 years ago

The 2019 crash, which has not been previously reported, killed Lee and seriously injured his two passengers, including a then-8-year old boy who was disemboweled. The lawsuit, filed against Tesla by the passengers and Lee's estate, accuses Tesla of knowing that Autopilot and other safety systems were defective when it sold the car.

Do we know anything about the likelihood of criminal charges over that crash?

dopamean4• 3 years ago

This may be a slightly weird thing to say and maybe I wont put it very eloquently but I'm somewhat of a believer in taking risks that can endanger lives now if it means doing something that is a net positive for everyone later. I'm not great historian but I think the aviation industry is a good example of this. Basically every plane crash that resulted in passengers dying has led to changes, and very often improvements, in air safety. Whether that be a change in the mechanical, software, or human systems that govern aviation. Globally these things are taken quite seriously because everyone understands how important it is. So it's odd to me to see such cavalier attitudes taken when it comes to self driving cars. Why not take safety more seriously? It will earn the industry a ton of trust and it could save lives.

kayodelycaon• 3 years ago

Why not take safety more seriously?

Because safety is a cost, not a feature.

Air travel and sea travel did not get safer because some companies got together and decided to spend a little money to advance society. Ships sank and planes crashed frequently.

Things got safer because governments took action. Look at the 737 MAX. The cause of the crashes wouldn't have been investigated and Boeing wouldn't have fixed their plane if governments hadn't taken action.

At scale, companies do not value human life, so regulations add costs to change the incentives. Otherwise human life is just another tragedy of the commons.

dopamean4• 3 years ago

I don't think that's a totally fair characterization of the history of air safety but I do mostly agree with your point. Government has to take action and right now they're just permitting anything... or that's what it looks like.

specialist• 3 years ago

Niedermeyer makes some interesting points about Tesla's FSD.

"Why urbanists are wrong about autonomous vehicles w/ Tesla critic Ed Niedermeyer" 2023-08-17

https://micromobility.io/news/why-urbanists-are-wrong-about-...

TLDR: Equating autonomous vehicles (AVs) with Tesla's FSD is a category error. Tesla's FSD is a fraud.

AndrewKemendo• 3 years ago

At this point we have a car company that puts out poor fit and finish quality vehicles, with terrible customer service, maximum data collection, and now arguably lethal $10k upgrades?

Why is this the future? Can we make it not the future? If the benefit of switching to electric is that high and the bar seemingly low (given the above), then shouldn’t we be seeing way more fully electric vehicle companies and models?

chemmail• 3 years ago

This article goes back and forth from Autopilot and Self driving. Which are totally different systems. I cannot even read this article.

Tesla braces for its first trial involving Autopilot fatality

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