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Comment by shagie | Hacker News Reader

Does enabling FSD come with any liability / terms of service? If it is backdoor enabled and the vehicle crashes, what is Tesla's liability? If the OTA patches to the system are needed and the car is running the base, unupdated (buggy) build, what is Tesla's liability?

Alternatively, if a vehicle is running software that hasn't gone through Tesla's subscription how much of the liability for any software problems will Tesla be able to transfer to the vehicle owner?

Hypothetically, if Tesla were licensing 3rd party software and that license was based on installed uses and Tesla was reporting the subscriptions for FSD (rather than sales of the vehicle), what would enabling the software open up Tesla to? Would Tesla then be able to sue the person who unlocked it for the additional licensing costs they incurred?

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It never has been Tesla’s responsibility if the FSD fails (whereas for Mercedes they take responsibility)

Did they ever figure that out?

> There are few federal laws addressing automated driving. So, Mercedes Vice President of Automated Driving George Massing tells R&T, “we will probably have to deal with each individual state.” But the company plans to accept legal liability for what the car does while Drive Pilot is engaged.

As far as I can tell there still isn’t some webpage where you can submit a claim to Mercedes-Benz for a failure of their self-driving tech…

https://www.kbb.com/car-news/mercedes-well-be-liable-for-sel...

In the opposite, Tesla sounds more like the type of company that would sue you if you claim autopilot brought you into a crash.

Since they are technically right, as autopilot disengages before.

> Since they are technically right, as autopilot disengages before.

> To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before impact, and we count all crashes in which the incident alert indicated an airbag or other active restraint deployed.

https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

I'm not a Tesla fan, but Mercedes doesn't have a fleet anywhere near Tesla's. This is a well-run marketing campaign to try to get Tesla to also accept responsibility and bring prices up, IMO. Mercedes isn't really accepting liability for shit at this point, because they only have like one car with level 3 and it's a super top trim and there won't be very many people using it. Once they have a large amount of vehicles out there with this tech, then we'll see what they really accept responsibility for.

> to try to get Tesla to also accept responsibility and bring prices up

If Tesla actually believed that their self-driving works (which they unequivocally and demonstrably don't, as their refusal to accept liability indicates), then it would cost them virtually nothing to accept liability.

Every company that offers self-driving should accept liability to prove that they have faith in their system, and we shouldn't allow any self-driving system on the road for which this isn't the case.

I think the mercedes taking responsibility thing was at least partially clever marketing. there are really extreme limitations last I saw, which honestly is understandable.

The limitations are due to the legal framework Mercedes lives up to. The updated version only recently came out.

I do think they are doing it more responsibly for sure. Just that given the limitations it’s difficult to compare the offerings at this point

If something is opened or modified without manufacturer consent, there is no question of liability because there is none.

Except history hasn't really played out that way. Less serious but Grand Theft Auto had a sex game added to one of their titles that wasn't supposed to be accessible by gamers. People figured out how to unlock it using a modified save file. This ended up in all sorts of legal liability to the company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_(minigame)

Hot Coffee is and was an absurd case with absolutely no merit behind it.

It only became a large issue because it was a social fad for politicians and mass-media to dogpile "evil gaming companies corrupting poor mindless children", and Rockstar in particular with the GTA series was one of the most popular targets of said social fad.

So if you're using unlocked a version of FSD that has been recalled and don't get an OTA update then any and all faults that may be traced back to FSD even if it was clear that this is a bug in the software (e.g. the reason for the recall) the vehicle owner has full liability?

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/16/tesla-recalls-362758-vehicle...

Software is a legal grey area as others pointed out. In your example, the vehicle owner modified the software version and used an unsupported one. The manufacturer cannot be liable when there is no legal contract.

The problem here is that this is functionally similar to using an outdated version of photoshop but the consequences are vastly different.

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