Drunk driver slept while Tesla appeared to drive Hwy 101 on autopilot

sfchronicle.com

6 points·daegloe··6 comments

Discussed yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18575586 (99 points/127 comments)

Tesla should showcase this as something that saved lives. Imagine if this moron fell asleep with normal cruise control.

If this guy is guilty of DUI, what does this say about the future of autonomous vehicles? While I expect autopilot is less sophisticated than autonomous vehicles, he wasn't given the opportunity to violate the "sophistication" of autopilot. I expect his vehicle would have remained under control of the autopilot on the freeway until he woke and disabled autopilot. He may then have been legally DUI, but if we trust autopilot, then he wasn't DUI at the time the police disrupted the autopilot.

But we don't trust the autopilot ; Tesla themselves instructs drivers to be ready for take over at all times, and I would bet that this is legally the expectation too.

I think there's a pretty clear distinction between autopilot and fully-autonomous vehicles, so I'm not too worried about this setting bad precedent. With autopilot, there is a human driver who is responsible for everything the vehicle does, and autopilot is there to help out to the extent that it can. With fully-autonomous vehicles, every human in the car is a passenger, so it's fine for everyone to be asleep.

It doesn’t say anything about the future because this is not an Autonomous Vehicle. He is the one driving the car. If you’re on one of those straight roads in the middle parts of America and you wedge the wheel to go dead straight and then drink a 40, you’re still the driver, not the car. And that’s what this is.

When we have AVs, we’ll put him in the back seat and it won’t be a DUI until he takes control of the vehicle.

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