Be Excellent To Each Other

Pretty straightforward case of driverless car kills its occupant - didn't pick out a big lorry turning across the road ahead.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... -elon-musk

Erk.

Ah - in the other thread I commented that there was no source for the 'could not distinguish the trailer against the sky' comment, but that link does cite Tesla themselves.

Pretty tragic I think. Will this put back the plans they have? I reckon so.

A truck turning is a pretty common occurence I'd say. I'm surprised the car didn't manage to avoid it.

The real crunch is going to come when one of them kills someone outside the car, in the nightmare scenario a pedestrian or something like that, and the car didn't avoid the accident even though it should have 'seen' the danger (as was the case in this accident).

What's interesting here though is that Tesla are saying that even though the car can drive autonomously, the driver should still almost be 'shadow driving' and ready to take action at any time if it looks like the car has missed something or is going to fuck something up.

For me this kind of eliminates the whole point of having a driverless car, (since you've almost got to drive it anyway), and also raises questions about how they're going to handle things going forward. Like, if a fatal accident happens where the car fucked it up, from a legal perspective does the driver still get the blame because they didn't take over quick enough?

If that'll be the case I can't see people exactly falling in love with driverless cars, TBH.

It eliminates a lot of the convenience aspect, but they're very much pushing the idea that overall the driverless car is a safer driver than you are.

No way dude. I've got an A class licence with a safety rating of 2.67.

How many people died in human-driven (drove?) cars in avoidable accidents yesterday?

You'd need to work out how many miles Teslas have driven themselves without killing anyone vs the stats for human drivers to get a meaningful comparison. But a car that can drive itself only not very well so you need to not drive it but still give the road your full attention as though you were driving seems like a pretty half arsed thing that's not ready for the road.

The article says something like the Tesla car had the equivalent of 134 million miles driven before a fatality vs 94 million for human driven cars.

Well, Tesla have been perfectly clear that the Autopilot feature on their cars is "public beta" and cannot be relied on.

Personally I don't think it should have been enabled on consumer vehicles, or at least not without some sort of limitations (e.g. using GPS to ensure that it can only be activated on motorways.)

It's a litigation shield. Tesla (and I'm willing to bet, every driverless manufacturer) is never going to assume full liability for accidents that occur in their vehicles.

That's entirely not what I'm getting at though. Humans making mistakes in cars and killing people is as old as cars themselves, and we have procedures and laws and insurance etc etc to deal with it, self-driving cars killing people because they made a mistake is something completely new.

If a Tesla driving autonomously makes a clear mistake that kills someone, who is to blame? Is it Tesla? Is it the driver because they were supposed to be shadow-driving and intervening if necessary? And how do you prove it one way or another? The window of opportunity for a driver to take corrective emergency action could be a split-second, what's the metric going to be for if it was their fault or the car's fault?

There's a massive list of considerations to be dealt with before driverless cars can be let loose on the roads IMO.

So who on earth is going to want one?

LOOK AT OUR AMAZING DRIVERLESS CAR! BUY NOW! (Oh but you still have to sort of drive it anyway, and if there's a crash it's your fault.)

Yeah, it seems like a bit of an all or nothing type of deal. Either you make something that is going to cause few enough accidents that you can deal with the claims or you don't bother. But that halfway house is never going to get much traction.

They'll assume liability in the end (the manufacturers). It'll just be priced in to the cost of the car.

Driverless cars will have to be shit slow.

It's not up to them whether they exclude liability for negligence, though. There will be ways around Tesla saying "can't rely on this system" arguing on the size of font.

I've been thinking about this and my thoughts lead on to stopping distances but then I thought about speed limits.

Would self driving cars be programmed to stick to the speed limits no matter what?

Almost certainly.

This alone would make them a hell of a lot safer than a lot of other cars I see on the road.

I'm not saying negligence though. Say that today 5% of accidents are genuinely unavoidable (kid runs out from behind a parked van, no way to spot, no way to stop in time, even when at a safe speed for the conditions). If Tesla can reduce that to 2%, that's fantastic. But they're not going to trade that 5% of driver liability for 2% of Tesla liability.

I just wonder whether human drivers and pedestrians will take the piss out of them. You can imagine every kid everywhere realising that if they run across a pavement when one's coming that it'll slam the brakes on. Or other drivers realising that as soon as they go to overtake the robocar will slow down to let them etc.

But they don't get to decide, though.

Through lobbying they might.

Surely they get to decide to some extent by saying 'you need to remain alert' rather than 'feel free to have a kip'?

Will Robocars fall for the 'invisible rope across the road' trick?

Or unscrupulous chalk artists drawing gaping holes in the floor?

Oh, do they actually scan the road surface for potholes and stuff?

That's arguable - your responsibility from a product liability point of view is dependent on "reasonably foreseeable use", and you can’t necessarily get around that by just putting warnings/disclaimers in the product manual saying "don't do this".

Myp makes a very good point though, but I suspect if we get to the situation where the government has to pass a law saying "driverless car manufacturers won't be liable if their cars flip out and murder people" the line of people prepared to buy one might end up quite short.

I wonder if Robocar will get pissed off if I cut him up.

I don't know what that means. Other than you've broken the page.

Poor Warbot Robocar.

Christine, innit.

Bloody heathen

Christine.

Christine innit, the murderous car from Stephen King's book of the same name, from the era when he was taking ALL THE DRUGS whilst writing.

EDIT - Wow, clearly need to be a bit quicker than that....

Might be Christine

I think for a lot of people it'll be even simpler than that, if the sales pitch for a driverless car isn't just 'Get in and tell it where you want to go, then do something else for however long it takes to get there', a lot of folks will lose interest.

And that's before you even start adding in legal or insurance responsibilities for monitoring what the car's doing at all times, being prepared to take emergency action, and so on.

Plus, I guess they're going to have to program the cars to be completely non-aggressive in all situations and always err completely on the side of safety, which if they're sharing the roads with human drivers (and pedestrians), could make for some very slow progress.....

It won't work until all cars are driverless, I'm guessing, so expect to see driverless lanes from 2030.

If only had to design them for that scenario then it would have been way easier as they could just all talk to each other or at least know with a high degree of certainty what the other cars are going to do.

Christine.

As an IT security bod, *shudder*

Rather than use the wireless networks, they could communicate car to car using some kind of flashing light system.

Put one on the corner of each car, and have the light flash when you intend to move or turn in roughly that direction.

Sounds dumb

And a light for when they're slowing down maybe.

Make that a different colour, so as not to confuse anything, red perhaps?

What about when you're turning onto a main road in traffic? Normally some kind soul lets you out eventually - won't driverless cars sit there forever until the end of rush hour?

If only we'd talked about how different companies have different sales pitches for driverless cars already and how there is no one approach.



Oh.

Yes.

Best to get a driverless motorbike if you live in a built up area.

*applause*