Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
Is Tesla liable if a driver dies on Autopilot? Juries will now decide (washingtonpost.com)
22 points by jocker12 993 days ago
3 comments

> Before Lee’s car collided with the palm tree, court documents say, he attempted to regain control of the car, but “Autopilot and/or Active Safety features would not allow.”

That's a load of horseshit.

If you hit the brakes or turn the wheel, it immediately shuts off AP.

Even if an active safety system was trying to dodge something that wasn't there, it's not hard to turn the wheel where you want to go and overrule the safety system.

Something really doesn't add up to what truly caused this crash.

You're describing the behavior when functioning properly.

There's obviously a non-zero chance it malfunctioned.

Remember the Toyota brakes case. They blamed the rider, the it turned out to be a stack overflow into data..
Not exactly sure how this is possibly going to go in favor of the plaintiffs here. It's pretty clear these are Level 2 driving techs and the driver is always responsible (which is reiterated constantly when you enable it). The only gotcha is it somehow they convince a jury that Tesla is being grossly negligent ... which would be quite the high bar to cross. Maybe they could argue that specific car was defective in some way, but I doubt it would be applicable to all cars.

My guess is this is going to settle before a verdict and we'll never hear about it again.

> My guess is this is going to settle before a verdict and we'll never hear about it again.

IMNAL, but I’d guess that at settlement would only be with this plaintiff and have no bearing on next time someone dies while using Autopilot.