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New Footage Shows Tesla On Autopilot Crashing Into Police Car After Alerting Driver 150 Times
(www.carscoops.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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That's similar to cruise control. Cruise control can be dangerous because someone could fall asleep (not having to manage your speed can afford up sleepiness) and the car wouldn't slow down.
In my opinion, those options are all the driver's responsibility to know their own limit and understand that the tool is just a tool and you are responsible to making sure your driving is safe for others. Tesla autopilot adds a ton of safety features that avoid a lot of collisions based on lacking attention, sleepiness, and actively avoiding other drivers faults. But it's still just a tool and the driver is responsible of their own car and driving.
The difference is that cruise control will maintain your speed, but 'autopilot' may avoid or slow down for obstacles. Maybe it avoids obstacles 90% of the time or 99% of the time. It apparently avoids obstacles enough that people can get lulled into a false sense of security, but once in a while it slams into the back of a stationary vehicle at highway speed.
It's easy to say it's the driver's responsibility, and ultimately it is, of course, but in practice, a system that works almost all of the time but occasionally causally kills somebody is very dangerous indeed, and saying it's all the driver's fault isn't really realistic or fair.
Actually it's absolutely realistic and fair. I don't like Musk, or Tesla for that matter. But they make it pretty damn clear that you're 100% responsible for the vehicle when using that feature. Anyone who assumes they don't need to pay attention is a moron and should be held responsible. If a 747 autopilot system starts telling the pilot to take control of the plane and they don't... we wouldn't blame the manufacturer, we'd blame the shitty pilot that didn't do their job.
If the driver gets lulled into a false sense of security by a convenience system like this and the automation fails, it's one thing to blame the driver, and that may or may not be fair depending on how much trust you place in the average driver's competence, but the (hypothetical) victim is still dead, and who we decide to blame won't make one iota of difference to that.