The difference is that Tesla said it was autopilot when it's really not. It's also clearly not ready for primetime. And auto regulators have pretty strict requirements about reliability and safety.
While that's true that autonomous cars kill FAR less people than human drivers, ever human is different. If an autonomous driver is subpar and that AI is rolled out to millions of cars, we've vastly lowered safety of cars. We need autonomous cars to be better than the best driver because, frankly, humans are shit drivers.
I'm 100% for autonomous cars taking over entirely. But Tesla isn't really trying to get there. They are trying to sell cars and lying about their capabilities. And because of that, Tesla should be liable for the deaths. We already have them partially liable: this case caused a recall of this feature.
maynarkh@feddit.nl 6 months ago
There is a big difference between Autopilot and that hypotethical uncle. If the uncle causes an accident or breaks shit, he or his insurance pays. Autopilot doesn’t.
By your analogy, it’s like putting a ton of learner drivers on the road with unqualified instructors, and not telling the instructors that they are supposed to be instructors, but that they are actually taking a taxi service. Except it’s somehow their responsibility. And of course pocketing both the instruction and taxi fees.
The bar is not incredibly high for self driving cars to be accepted. The only thing is that they should take the blame if they mess up, like all other drivers.
burliman@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Yeah, for sure. Like I said, I get the difference. But ultimately we are talking about injury prevention. If automated cars prevented one less death per mile than human drivers, we would think they are terrible. Even though they saved one life.
And even if they only caused one death per year we’d hear about it and we might still think they are terrible.