The warnings are clear when enabling the driver assistance system. You are responsible. Pay attention. If you don’t, you’re liable. Any Tesla drivers who say otherwise are a combination of ignorant and liars.
The warnings are clear when enabling the driver assistance system. You are responsible. Pay attention. If you don’t, you’re liable. Any Tesla drivers who say otherwise are a combination of ignorant and liars.
I'd phrase your question differently though: how much responsibility does Tesla have in selling a mass consumer product that allows consumers to be irresponsible and negligent in a friction-less manner.
Tesla has had to be dragged kicking and screaming into compliance for safety issue after safety issue:
Early AP/FSD required a hand on the steering wheel only once every FIFTEEN MINUTES.
Tesla was the cause of the requirement to consider an incident "within 5 seconds" of an AP/FSD disengagement to be considered for those factors.
Tesla was the last manufacturer to implement cabin monitoring.
(I despise them too, for the record) Musk has said that he'd have Tesla pay a fine for every vehicle shipped just to avoid having the airbag warning on sunvisors.
Many other tales abound, from component firmware developers being aghast that when shipping new firmware to Tesla that had a 36 hour test suite and cycle, that they'd get emails 3-4 hours later that said "looks great, thanks" and would explain that they "just flashed it onto a car they had and took it for a drive".
Even if we do not attempt to estimate the true underlying rate, there are over 1,000 reported crashes that Tesla has declined to investigate. The upper bound can not be tightened further than that without investigation or a robust predictive/statistical model. Even underestimating the credible upper bound at 1,000 fatalities constitutes a material number of deaths as that would be many times less safe than a human driver.
You need to tighten the upper bound before your assertions that there have not been a material number of deaths are credible.
As mentioned up thread, irresponsible drivers hold the blame for deaths caused. If you can’t use the feature safely, you shouldn’t use it, or have access to it. Irresponsible drivers in non Tesla vehicles will continue to maim and kill others just fine on a daily basis (~40k deaths/year, ~109 per day).
(I despise Elon too, but the data tells the story for us)
People regularly do not read the manual. People regularly do not read warning messages. Everybody knows that. Claiming that you have cleared up confusion because you wrote a warning message that says the opposite of the advertising you created is deliberate and calculated deception.
NOBODY in that room made an honest mistake: "Oh my goodness, I thought people read and carefully consider warning messages." BULLSHIT. Everybody knows this is pure legal head-up-ass-covering. Twisting ethics into a pretzel to come up with implausible excuses for such blatant deception is just plain absurd.