Elon Musk and Tesla ignored Autopilot’s fatal flaws, judge says evidence shows

Tesla may owe punitive damages to victim as key trial over Autopilot proceeds.

See full article...

 

[mg224]

And? What are we supposed to take away from a two year old article from a biased website?

Wait, you mean teslerati[.]com isn’t a bastion of objective reporting? I am shocked. Or the other thing.

 

[Cax]

Request from an American. Stop misnaming us. Citizens of the United States of America are Americans. There is one rule that people routinely forget: Don't be an asshole. Use the terms you're asked to use.

Is there another term for a person from any country in either North or South America?

 

[Veritas super omens]

Musk is the luckiest whiniest brat in the world. He'll weasel his way out of this too

My guess? He'll sue the judge.

 

[hestermofet]

Musk has shown he has no regard for human life, so he needs to pay.

Musk is the luckiest whiniest brat in the world. He'll weasel his way out of this too

I'm only half-convinced at this point that Autopilot running over people is a bug, and not actually an intended feature. Elon Musk's hero once said:

"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's, like, incredible."

This seems to be Elon Musk's attitude to Autopilot.

 

[Mordics]

And? What are we supposed to take away from a two year old article from a biased website?

Clearly it is utterly unacceptable to be regulated by anyone who knows anything about, and thus has opinions on, the area they are regulating. Why if you let things like that happen the government might not just blindly rubber stamp whatever established players in an industry want.

 

[hestermofet]

Request from an American. Stop misnaming us. Citizens of the United States of America are Americans. There is one rule that people routinely forget: Don't be an asshole. Use the terms you're asked to use.

Fuck off. Don't be an asshole, please address your response to this post to "Your royal highness".

 

[Veritas super omens]

Request from an American. Stop misnaming us. Citizens of the United States of America are Americans. There is one rule that people routinely forget: Don't be an asshole. Use the terms you're asked to use.

If you want specifity, go with 'Murican. People will know exactly which country in the America's the person (or people) hail from. Plus it adds just the right connotations.

 

[gsgrego]

It's a fan site, but what's not disputed is that Missy Cummings had a previously undisclosed seat on the board of of Veoneer, a LIDAR company. That's sufficient reason to wonder if she has an axe to grind with Tesla.

I hear cops are biased against criminals and so we should ignore them completely.

 

[GreyAreaUK]

Citizens of the United States of America are Americans.

But not all Americans are citizens of the United States of America.

If we’re going to be pedantic.

 

[hestermofet]

99.9% is still better than any human though. I think we can agree that no human perfectly handles 100% of cases, it is just not physically possible to do. That is why we have human accidents every day. So the more reasonable question is what % IS considered acceptable. If humans are 95% and a given system is 99.9%, well for me I prefer whichever of the two has better statistics overall.

This is very questionable statistics.

First, 99.9% is some number somebody pulled out of their ass, we don't know how many cases Tesla's system fails in. In terms of cross-traffic, it sounds like significantly lower success rate than 99.9%, enough that Tesla got sued for killing enough people.

Second, there ARE individuals who can handle 100% of cases perfectly, with no incidents that are worthy of reporting on to a driver's abstract. There are drivers with impeccably clean driving records that go back 40 years. On aggregate, humans as a whole cannot handle 100% of all cases of adverse driving perfectly. But through a combination of luck and skill, there are some individuals who can, so stating "no human perfectly handles 100% of cases, it is just not physically possible to do" is completely false when there is clear evidence to the contrary.

Just because you might be a shitty driver, don't make broad sweeping statements that all people are.

That is why we have human accidents every day. So the more reasonable question is what % IS considered acceptable.

No, this is not why we have accidents everyday. We have accidents every day because of the law of the vital few. According to the Pareto Principle, 80% of consequences are the result of 20% of causes. You can probably expect that 80% of accidents are caused by 20% of drivers. The average driver is generally good enough to not cause an accident.

 

[Goatous]

Request from an American. Stop misnaming us. Citizens of the United States of America are Americans. There is one rule that people routinely forget: Don't be an asshole. Use the terms you're asked to use.

Canada is in North America. Brazil is in South America. This person used clumsy terminology, but it's accurate.

Now, back to the subject at hand.

 

[hrpanjwani]

I have always considered it in bad taste that Tesla uses everyone who buys its cars and by extension, everyone else on the road to be beta testers. I mean, buying the car and agreeing to become a beta tester (albeit many people do not really understand what they have signed up for) is one thing. But even those of us have not bought the car are essentially unwilling beta testers aren’t we? We are participating in this experiment without our consent.

Its downright criminal that the promised result, fully autonomous self driving, if ever achieved (seems unlikely without a form of AGI) would then be the property of a corporation and not fall in the public domain. Seems like a perfect case of socialising costs and privatizing profits.

Would something like FRAND licensing terms be enough to get Tesla to share their tech with others or will something stronger be required eventually? The Elon of 2010 I would have trusted (naively one might add) to offer FRAND, maybe even more. I am pretty sure the Elon of 2020 will not do that.

 

[hrpanjwani]

Double comment

 

[NuckFutter]

It's a fan site, but what's not disputed is that Missy Cummings had a previously undisclosed seat on the board of of Veoneer, a LIDAR company. That's sufficient reason to wonder if she has an axe to grind with Tesla.

It seems like more of a reason to think she may actually be an expert and have some knowledge to offer the proceedings.

 

[numerobis]

There is no effective difference between somebody who has never been in an accident, and someone who is not capable of being in an accident.

Everyone is capable of murder in the right circumstances, but is it fair to say most people are not murderers? Or it more accurate to say most of us are lucky enough to never have been pushed to committing murder?

That's the dumbest argument I've read all day.

Please stay off the roads if you think you're a perfect driver.

 

[harlequin69]

So the more reasonable question is what % IS considered acceptable.

When the vehicle manufacturer is willing to be 100% legally liable for any damage or injury caused by a car that is being driven by their system.

 

[orwelldesign]

In re: "Americans"

The scariest thing I've ever been a part of? Had to do with exactly this question.

A bus I was on in Mexico, was pulled over by the Federales, the Mexican federal police. Well, people in Federales uniforms -- it was actually a shakedown.

Most everybody just got shook. I did. I always keep a hundred bucks for a bribe, just in case. Seems cheaper than the alternative.

But this one dude? He did that. "But I'm an American!" The Federales? They were real unimpressed -- "we're American too, asshole."

Dude took a pretty good pistol-whipping before he shut up, too. Like, dude, I don't think these fellas, out of all the fellas in the world, give a flying fuck if you're American or USan or whatever the fuck. But they (the feds) really weren't impressed.

 

[NuckFutter]

There are no such individuals. There are individuals who have gotten lucky 100% of the time so far, and plenty who tilt the odds in their favour, but none of us are perfect.

It seems as though the logic being applied here is faulty. While I can see how luck does play a role over time, this back and forth misses the type of catastrophic failures that Tesla commits. No driver is unlucky enough to drive into a concrete median on a highway, to decapitate himself under a cross-wise semi, or repeatedly plow into stationary emergency vehicles. That's a fucking mistake, not being unlucky. And Tesla makes a seemingly large amount of mistakes that few humans not suffering a heart attack would make.

 

[dwl-sdca]

There is no effective difference between somebody who has never been in an accident, and someone who is not capable of being in an accident.

Everyone is capable of murder in the right circumstances, but is it fair to say most people are not murderers? Or is it more accurate to say most of us are lucky enough to never have been pushed to committing murder?

I'm going to be pedantic and disagree about "murder". I can agree that there ate times when someone might kill to defend themselves or family when under serious attack. That may be homicide but not "murder". There is a real, not merely semantic difference.

 

[Flipper35]

I don't know why they can't just let AutoPilot go. Everyone I know that chooses a Tesla car is because of its charging network, not AutoPilot.

Edit: Aw Nevermind I think I am confusing AP with FSD. Sorry, carry on

I think lots get those confused. Even Tesla tries to use them interchangeably some days.

 

[fivemack]

Is there another term for a person from any country in either North or South America?

I would be almost inclined to use something like 'Americano' for that, which is coincidentally correct in both Spanish and Portuguese which covers the official languages of almost all the countries in those continents and the second-most-common language in the largest one.

 

[numerobis]

It seems as though the logic being applied here is faulty. While I can see how luck does play a role over time, this back and forth misses the type of catastrophic failures that Tesla commits. No driver is unlucky enough to drive into a concrete median on a highway, to decapitate himself under a cross-wise semi, or repeatedly plow into stationary emergency vehicles. That's a fucking mistake, not being unlucky. And Tesla makes a seemingly large amount of mistakes that few humans not suffering a heart attack would make.

I was reacting just to the point about some humans being perfect.


For the Tesla part, their system isn't designed to be 99.whatever effective at driving autonomously, it's just a fancy cruise control. The problem is that people act like it is autonomously driving (which blows my mind... I use these systems, they sure as heck don't strike me as being trustworthy). Other manufacturers, who make equivalent driving systems, have better driver monitoring to make sure the driver is in fact engaged.

 

[numerobis]

I would be almost inclined to use something like 'Americano' for that, which is coincidentally correct in both Spanish and Portuguese which covers the official languages of almost all the countries in those continents and the second-most-common language in the largest one.

That's got kind of a watered down connotation though.

 

[Navalia Vigilate]

99.9% is still better than any human though. I think we can agree that no human perfectly handles 100% of cases, it is just not physically possible to do. That is why we have human accidents every day. So the more reasonable question is what % IS considered acceptable. If humans are 95% and a given system is 99.9%, well for me I prefer whichever of the two has better statistics overall.

Mario Andretti would like to take you for a little ride. He does it all the time, press, investors, fans, future racers, and he presses it to the limits while they are in the car and does it all day long leaving other professional car drivers in awe. Mario is probably the 95% you are referring to. Us regular drivers are probably between 70%-90% depending upon our overall experience and training. FSD seems to be around 50-60% if we are comparing it to Level 5 requirements.

 

[fivemack]

99.9% is still better than any human though. I think we can agree that no human perfectly handles 100% of cases, it is just not physically possible to do. That is why we have human accidents every day. So the more reasonable question is what % IS considered acceptable. If humans are 95% and a given system is 99.9%, well for me I prefer whichever of the two has better statistics overall.

99.9% of what? There is one reportable car accident in the US for about every 500,000 miles driven (which is a lot - at the average 13,500 miles per year per driver it's saying that most drivers will be in about one such in a lifetime), of which about one in two hundred is fatal; if you have an 'if I had done that significantly worse I could have been involved in an accident' moment every five hundred miles or so, that is 99.9% success.

 

[aq42]

his "Model 3 drove under the trailer of an 18-wheeler big rig truck that had turned onto the road, shearing off the Tesla's roof"

In Europe, side and rear underrun protection are mandated on all lorries and trailers with a gross weight of 3,500 kilograms (7,700 lb) or more.[60]

So why don't you mandate this in America? Regardless of whether the fault lies with the car or with its driver (or with the truck driver), it saves lives.

 

[fivemack]

Mario Andretti would like to take you for a little ride. He does it all the time, press, investors, fans, future racers, and he presses it to the limits while they are in the car and does it all day long leaving other professional car drivers in awe. Mario is probably the 95% you are referring to. Us regular drivers are probably between 70%-90% depending upon our overall experience and training. FSD seems to be around 50-60% if we are comparing it to Level 5 requirements.

"One of the most successful drivers in the history of motorsports", against the over two hundred million drivers licence holders in the US, seems like a 99.99999th-percentile to me.

 

[numerobis]

In before Eric Berger tells us how the Tesla autopilot really was successful and then goes on to ramble about how much more important "doers" are than "checkers"...

So you're one of those geniuses who doesn't understand the difference between testing and deployment?

There would be no legal case if the problem was Tesla cars in controlled test environments were ending up crashing.

The legal case is that deployed Tesla cars sold to consumers are killing their occupants because in real use, the occupants can reasonably be expected to do stupid things -- and proper human factors engineering takes that into account. When other companies find a way to be foolproof (until a bigger fool shows up) and Tesla doesn't follow the state of the art, it becomes potentially liable.

 

[numerobis]

his "Model 3 drove under the trailer of an 18-wheeler big rig truck that had turned onto the road, shearing off the Tesla's roof"

In Europe, side and rear underrun protection are mandated on all lorries and trailers with a gross weight of 3,500 kilograms (7,700 lb) or more.[60]

So why don't you mandate this in America? Regardless of whether the fault lies with the car or with its driver (or with the truck driver), it saves lives.

Per your link: "strong lobbying and opposition by the trucking industry".

Rear guards are mandated now. Side guards will probably be before too long. Maybe just a couple more decades?

Given the violence of the crash I think it's likely the outcome would have been pretty bad even with them.

 

[nimble]

But not all Americans are citizens of the United States of America.

If we’re going to be pedantic.

George W had a good solution to the problem: proud to be Merkin.

 

[Nilt]

Request from an American. Stop misnaming us. Citizens of the United States of America are Americans. There is one rule that people routinely forget: Don't be an asshole. Use the terms you're asked to use.

As a citizen of the United States, kindly fuck off with your bullshit. I am as much an American as I am a US-ian. Everyone who lives in the Americas but not in the US has a legitimate gripe about our co-opting of the name of two entire continents where we take up less than half of one. So, again, in all seriousness, fuck all the way off with that crap.

Edited to add: In case you happen to be a right wing fucknugget, the founding fathers didn't use such terms, either. They almost universally, if not entirely universally, referred to themselves as Virginians or whatever the equivalent for their states were. So, again, fuck all the way off with your bullshit claims of ownership of the name of two whole continents.

Sincerely, a natural-born US citizen.