Press the brake.
Pedal. To the. Metal.
Reminds me of the Chinese issue: you run over someone, but they are likely not dead. Will you save their life but accept having to pay for whatever healthcare costs they have until they are recovered? Or will you run over them again, to make sure they die and your punishment will be a lot lighter?
The funny part will be once the car doesn’t have a driver and is full autonomous. If the car kills someone, who’s to blame?
The company that rented it to you, because fully self-driving cars won’t be for private ownership, they’ll just replace rideshare drivers.
Even with autopilot I feel it’s unlikely that driver would not be liable. We didn’t have a case yet but once this happens and goes higher to courts it’ll immediatly establish a liability precedence.
Some interesting headlines:
- a fatal crash where the driver claims his Tesla was on autopilot when it fatally struck a motorcyclist. (ongoing)
- ‘Autopilot’ hit-run driver sentenced to nine months (australia, claims that autopilot was on but it’s unclear)
So I’m pretty sure that autopilot drivers would be found liable very fast if this developed further.
I’m not aware of a single jurisdiction on the planet that makes Tesla liable for what the vehicle does when autopilot is enabled. In order to activate autopilot you have to accept about 3 different disclaimers on the car’s screen that state VERY clearly how you are still responsible for the vehicle and you must intervene if it starts behaving dangerously.
I’ve been driving with autopilot for over 2 years, and while it has done some stupid stuff before (taking wrong turns, getting in the wrong lane, etc.), it has NEVER come close to hitting another vehicle or person. Any time something out of the ordinary happens, I disengage autopilot and take over.
This reminds me of that Chinese law about being personally responsible for all medical debts of a person you run over—incentivizing killing the person, rather than injuring them.
That rumor is so stupid it doesn’t even begin to stack up. Paying medical bills sucks, but killing someone even unintentionally puts you at risk of jail time. Vanishingly few people are going to choose a decade or more of hard labor in jail over paying a debt.
The only thing this whole rumor proves is that people will believe the most irrational things about China as long as it makes Chinese people look bad.
I’ve seen this in comments a lot but never a source, do you happen to have one?
Only source seems to be this Slate article:
In respect to that specific Slate article, Snopes had some issues with it and labeled the story as “unproven”:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chinese-drivers-kill-pedestrians/
The Snopes article does a nice job of pointing out the Slate article’s issues.
You’re right about the Snopes article. It does do a decent job of pointing out that a lot of this reporting is rumor based.
This first anecdote (also highlighted by Snopes) is amusing
Double-hit cases" have been around for decades. I first heard of the “hit-to-kill” phenomenon in Taiwan in the mid-1990s when I was working there as an English teacher. A fellow teacher would drive us to classes. After one near-miss of a motorcyclist, he said, “If I hit someone, I’ll hit him again and make sure he’s dead.” Enjoying my shock, he explained that in Taiwan, if you cripple a man, you pay for the injured person’s care for a lifetime. But if you kill the person, you “only have to pay once, like a burial fee.” He insisted he was serious—and that this was common.
So is it Taiwan or the mainland with these wild laws?
Another false claim about China, it seems.
Thanks for the links, it’s much appreciated
Strange to assume that swerving will definitely kill one of them. What if you swerve off the road, or slam on the brakes? The reason the trolley problem works is that it’s on rails and you’re not operating it.
Immagino having a car that doesn’t pretend to drive herself but it’s enjoyable to drive, a car that doesn’t pretend to be a fucking movie because it’s just a car, a car without two thousands different policies to accept in wich you will never know what’s written but a car that you will be able to drive even though you decided to wear a red shirt on a Thursday morning which in you distorted future society is a political insult to some shithead CEO, a car that you own not a subscription based loan ,a car that keeps very slowly polluting the environment instead of polluting it with heavy chemicals dig up from childrens while still managing to pollute in CO2 exactly the same as the next 20 years of the slow polluting one not to mention where the current comes from, a car that will run forever if you treat it well and with minor fixes with relative minor environment impact and doesn’t need periodic battery replacement which btw is like building a new vehicle … This are not only a critical thoughts about green washing but are meant to make you reflect on the different meanings of ownership in different time periods
And yes I will always think that all environmentalists that absolutely needs a car should drive a 1990s car, fix it, save it from the dump fields and drive it till it crashes into a wall …
