Tesla braces for its first trial involving Autopilot fatality

The headline makes it sound like Tesla is trialing a new 'fatality' feature for it's autopilot.

Autopilot is not safe.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-autopilot-crashes-elon-musk/

The second trial, set for early October in a Florida state court, arose out of a 2019 crash north of Miami where owner Stephen Banner’s Model 3 drove under the trailer of an 18-wheeler big rig truck that had pulled into the road, shearing off the Tesla's roof and killing Banner. Autopilot failed to brake, steer or do anything to avoid the collision, according to the lawsuit filed by Banner's wife.

Is this the guy who was literally paying no attention to the road at all and was watching a movie whilst the car was in motion?

I legit can't find information on it now as every result I can find online is word for word identical to that small snippet. Such is modern journalism.

I know people like to get a hard on with the word "autopilot", but even real pilots with real autopilot still need to "keep an eye on things" when the system is engaged. This is why we have two humans in the cockpit on those big commercial jets.

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It seems like an obvious flaw that's pretty simple to explain. Car is learnt to operate the infromation about collisions on a set height. The opening between the wheels of a truck's trailer thus could be treated by it as a free space. It's a rare situation, but if it's confirmed and reproduceable, that, at least, raises concerns, how many other glitches would drivers learn by surprise.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 28 (Reuters) - Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) is set to defend itself for the first time at trial against allegations that failure of its Autopilot driver assistant feature led to death, in what will likely be a major test of Chief Executive Elon Musk's assertions about the technology.

Self-driving capability is central to Tesla’s financial future, according to Musk, whose own reputation as an engineering leader is being challenged with allegations by plaintiffs in one of two lawsuits that he personally leads the group behind technology that failed.

The first, scheduled for mid-September in a California state court, is a civil lawsuit containing allegations that the Autopilot system caused owner Micah Lee’s Model 3 to suddenly veer off a highway east of Los Angeles at 65 miles per hour, strike a palm tree and burst into flames, all in the span of seconds.

Banner’s attorneys, for instance, argue in a pretrial court filing that internal emails show Musk is the Autopilot team's "de facto leader".

Tesla won a bellwether trial in Los Angeles in April with a strategy of saying that it tells drivers that its technology requires human monitoring, despite the "Autopilot" and "Full Self-Driving" names.

In one deposition, former executive Christopher Moore testified there are limitations to Autopilot, saying it "is not designed to detect every possible hazard or every possible obstacle or vehicle that could be on the road," according to a transcript reviewed by Reuters.

The original article contains 986 words, the summary contains 241 words. Saved 76%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I can't understand how anyone is even able to let the car do something on its own. I drive old Dacia Logan and Renault Scénic, but at work we have Škoda Karoq and I can't even fully trust its beeping backing sensors or automatic handbrake. I can't imagine if the car steered, accelerated or braked without me telling it to.

Although it’s far from perfect, autopilot gets into a lot less accidents per mile than drivers without autopilot.

They have some statistics here: https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

EDIT: As pointed out by commenters in this thread, autopilot is mainly used on high ways, whereas the crash average is on all roads. Also Tesla only counts a crash if the airbag was deployed, but the numbers they compared against count every crash, including the ones without deployed airbags.