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Comment by noneeeed | Hacker News Reader

Well that's disturbing. It doesn't bode well for how they are building their self-driving systems. A simple set of ultrasonic reversing sensors would be enough to prevent this.

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Tesla is known to play fast and loose with their driver assist and autonomous vehicle tech and insist on avoiding lidar. Waymo and Cruise are a lot more conservative.

As a society, we have not figured out who is liable in cases like this -- the owner or the car company that engineered the AI.

> As a society, we have not figured out who is liable in cases like this -- the owner or the car company that engineered the AI.

For the most part none of this is novel to the law.

So long as the owner didn’t do anything negligent themselves, then it seems a strong claim of product liability (defective product). It seems there is very little chance of contributory negligence of the owner with this function, unlike crashes in self-drive mode, where the driver was supposed to pay attention and maintain their hands on the wheel, but turns out they were sleeping or in the backseat live streaming.

I do think there should be legislation adopted to protect the victims by giving them a statutory private right of action against both the owner and the car manufacturer to hold them jointly and severally liable for any accident involving self driving vehicles, then in practice the owner/manufacturer (i.e. their insurance companies) to sort out liability.

I've read that Tesla's summon feature requires the user to continually hold down a button on their phone in order to have the car continue its slow progress in driving towards the user.

Assuming that's the case, I would argue that this specific sort of accident is squarely in the domain of the user.

Can confirm that this is actually how it works. As soon as you let go of the button, the car instantly stops.

Not even mentioning the explicit warnings to keep line of sight when you use smart summon, as well as the fact that summon is automatically limited to only within 20 meters of the car.

What about the copy on Tesla's website that says "have your car come to you while you deal with a fussy child"?

Imagine holding a child in your arms and pressing a button with your fingers. This is basically a low bar to jump over in multitasking/human dexterity, however it’s the core value of summoning your vehicle.

You may say multitasking is hard or impossible but we humans manage to approximate it anyways because it’s necessary for life. For example, if you are the parent of two fussy children in a busy parking lot, you better know how to multitask or one of those kids will escape your sight!

Oof that's right up there with

"The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons"

from the 5+ year old marketing video still featured on https://www.tesla.com/autopilot

Do you happen to have a link to Tesla's webpage that says this?

Asking not because I don't believe it, but because the only results I get on google by searching for that quote are your comments on HN from this year in multiple threads that include it.

If the Tesla website indeed says it (which I am yet to find), I would write it off as just future-promise-marketing. You can call it misleading in that case, which would be fair.

At the end of the day, that's not how it currently works, and you have to hold the button for the car to move during summon, and you gotta be within 20 meter radius. As soon as you let the button go, the car stops. This isn't me just saying based on what internet says, this is what I have observed myself and what the car manual says[0] (both the online and the print version, in multiple spots).

0. https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-6B9A1AE...

> the only results I get on google by searching for that quote are your comments on HN

It's interesting how Google narrows your world view.

> If the Tesla website indeed says it (which I am yet to find)

Here you go:

https://www.tesla.com/blog/introducing-software-version-10-0

> I would write it off as just future-promise-marketing

No, it's just lies and advertising.

I’m not sure it’s as cut-and-dry as you suggest. Suppose you have to hold down a button to keep a meat-slicer blade moving. Then, as you slice a piece of meat, the slicer blade suddenly flies out and strikes a nearby customer and injures them. Later, it’s discovered that a faulty design or a manufacturing defect cause the blade to fly out. There’d still be a very good case that the manufacturer would still be liable for the defect.

Now, here, maybe the user could have prevented the car accident by letting go of the button. But, what if the user had faith (however misplaced) that the car was going to avoid the collision until it was too late to let go? Or what if the user had suffered a stroke at that particular moment and couldn’t let go? It’s an interesting thought experiment.

It’s not an interesting thought experiment. The finger on the button is no different than the toe on the gas pedal.

It is different: in a normal car, the driver controls the angle of the vector via the steering wheel, but with the Summon feature, the car’s programming does.

Although there are consumer protection laws that puts the onus on the company -- in America, where it is caveat venditor -- there is also the question of how much decision-making power we want to give to automation in general, and who is ultimately responsible.

Some things, like the decision to trigger a weapon in an act of war may be something societies want to have humans, and only humans make the ultimate call. That is, there is a desire for a human-in-the-loop.

On the other end of the spectrum are decisions we want to take out of the human hands because we think automation is more reliable and better for our society.

And then there are the unintended consequences. Looking back the past 10 years, it's arguable that the 'share' and 'retweet' features of social media that gives the power of virality to ordinary people have had a profound effect on our society and culture, both for good and for bad (and for many cases where we can't even agree on what's good or bad).

I argue that, while some of this is not novel to the law, I don't necessarily think that those precedents cover all of the changes tech has wrought to how we live and govern ourselves.

>I do think there should be legislation adopted to protect the victims by giving them a statutory private right of action against both the owner and the car manufacturer

If my car is parked in a parking lot, and someone rams my car so that it rolls and hits another car, I am liable. This is why parking breaks are important

I don't understand why self driving cars would be any different. I am liable to make sure I am using my car properly. Even if it has fancy tech.

The person who hit your car and caused it to roll is also liable to the person who owns the car yo damaged.

It borders on reckless than Tesla isn't using LiDAR or a similar sensor.

Relying on images only requires you to perfectly identify every object in the scene in order to infer its bounding box. And that's an issue like we see here where you don't expect to see private jets near a Tesla and so it may not be modelled.

With LiDAR, Radar etc. at least they know "something" is there even if they don't know what is.

You shouldn't need to identify objects using images, just that the parallax shift indicates something there.

IIRC their cameras are videoconference grade webcam FHD sensors. Lots of noise in that signal.

How much would a LiDAR add to the cost of a Tesla?

I don't know about the cost of the hardware itself, but there is also the cost to license the tech, with different lidar companies attempting grab a piece of the patentable space for lidar.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/24/22451404/tesla-luminar-li...

https://www.patentforecast.com/2021/07/22/lidar-competition-...

https://www.patentforecast.com/2021/09/02/waymo-is-driving-l...

Well my Robovac cost $300 and has LIDAR. Not the same grade, but it’s not like it’s fundamentally expensive. You could use RADAR too; sensors are not always expensive and when produced in bulk costs go down.

Tesla says that the owner is supposed to be able to see the car during all parts of the summon procedure precisely to prevent situations like this. Tesla knows that this system is not perfect.

Fwiw, the best use of summon is simply getting out of a tight parking spot (e.g., some residential garages).

Expecting it to be a valet is ambitious in its current state.

Tesla also says that "your car will come to you while you deal with a fussy child".

So which is the definitive statement?

Disclosure: I own a Tesla and I love it. I wasn’t certain until I drove one, and then I knew immediately that it was the car for me (and it has been great).

That said, some of the Tesla marketing, like in the example you provided, is very far off the mark. I really wish they wouldn’t do that, since it makes people question the other things marketed about the car that are (more or less) accurate.

Fwiw, the summon feature is a nice, minor convenience. I would even say that it is well-implemented for simple use cases. That said, the existing feature does not match the dreams that Tesla is currently selling (imho).

There seems to be a very very clear disconnect between Tesla car's actual capabilities, their marketing claims, and the stuff they say to cover their asses legally.

The part of the jet it hit was in the air, the ultrasonic sensors are the main way it avoids hitting non-car objects in Smart Summon, and they have those all around the car.

I feel like there must be some way to detect and avoid objects that occlude space the car intends to occupy but that also don't touch the ground inside that footprint.

Maybe a lidar would've prevented these types of issues.

But how often is a car at risk of not clearing something in a parking lot? I don’t think they should be adding cost (manufacturing complexity, material/part cost) to specifically handle driving around a runway.

there are no rules about what kind of objects can exist in a parking lot. if they can't account for hanging obstructions, which are actually quite frequent everywhere, they probably should err on the side of "less likely to kill people" and just not offer it.

Not a Tesla, just a plain old fuckup on my part - I backed into a fan box mounted about 3’ off the ground in a parking garage. Was too reliant on cameras and the backup radar- didn’t look and boom - nice big crease in my rear panel. So yes this sort of thing is not some sort of crazy edge case only encountered on airport tarmacs.

Hitting a partially lowered garage door seems the most likely.

Other vehicles can be pretty far off the ground sometimes, and while I don't know if summon can avoid those, autopilot sure doesn't.

Probably not outside spaces, but here such thing as ventilation shafts in parts of underground parking infra are not exactly rare.

Signs, banners, forklifts, scaffolding. Lots of things that humans would know not to hit, and automated cars should know not to hit.

Tree branches.

I feel like if you need to think about a case like this for its own sake then there may be some more fundamental problem with your approach.

I bet it'd work great on Mars, though. Not a whole lot of airplanes there, now or in the foreseeable future.

More flying vehicles on Mars than people.

Jet crushed the upper windshield right in the spot where Tesla hides its monocular camera cluster.

The card could have realized it hit something based on the engine load.

I find disturbing how the car just keep going... This is not a sensor issue.

The owner controls it by holding the button. Like a gas pedal.

Your comparison doesn't hold.

Tesla stops when it sense a imminent collision even if you have your foot on the pedal.

But, based on the incident, it seems to rely on the cameras and radars. Not on engine performance data.

Safety mechanisms don’t remove liability. If a car doesn’t stop of it’s own volition to avoid a crash while the driver continues accelerating (and most cars don’t), the responsibility is still with the driver.

Fair.

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