Quote:
Originally Posted by seifrob
But it poses interesting question and I hope someone can clarify it to us (confused europeans):
From european-law point of view:
- was the driver warned that so called "autopilot" feature is driver assist only?
- was the driver paying constant and full attention to traffic?
- did the driver damage more property or claimed someone elses life so we can claim reward on his insurance company?
Case closed.
So please explain why is someone investigating Tesla???
IMHO their worst fault was to market it as "autopilot" instead of "smart drive-assist" and not to inform their stockholders about the incident (but why they should in the first place??)
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Tesla explicitly states that the feature is a driving aid, and that full attention is required. I believe the car progressively slows if you don't have your hands on the steering wheel. Furthermore, most jurisdictions likely have laws that require hands to be on the steering wheel at all times.
Obviously, the driver was not paying attention, otherwise he would have made some attempt to avoid what should have been an obvious danger.
Any legal system naturally grows in complexity, becoming cumbersome as new laws are introduced, while few previous laws expire. This has the effect of slowly removing the rights and responsibility of the individual, and making it impossible to know what is legal, and what is not.
All systems of organization are doomed to collapse at some point, usually with the result of a new simpler system being created.
Back on topic, innovation is difficult to implement because people don't have any tolerance for tragedy that can even remotely be attributed to the innovation, regardless of how it improves life. The problem is compounded by the fact that there is no way to determine the instances where an automated system prevented or reduced the severity of something bad happening.
Media and our own attention is almost never focused on real threats or issues that most affect us. We would rather expend disproportionate resources on things like terrorism, which kills so few people compared with the more likely threats of heart disease, cancer, auto fatalities, etc.
Our laws are largely based on emotional reaction, rather than reasoned responses to objective facts.
With regard to the urban legends you mentioned; I'm not aware of them, and don't have answers to any of your questions. I have a friend that tried to dry his cell phone out in a microwave and was surprised to find that it destroyed it. I asked him "didn't it seem obvious that would be the outcome". His response was "I didn't put it in for very long". My reply "1 second is more than enough to completely destroy it". Somehow it wasn't obvious to him that hitting a nano-engineered device that is designed to operate at no more than about 5 watts, with 1000 watts of microwave radiation, was recipe for disaster.