Self-Driving Cars

"Tesla Employee Who Loved Elon Musk Reportedly Killed by Full Self-Driving" by Futurism (alternative story by Business Insider). The summary of the article is as follows:

• The deceased, Hans von Ohain, was a Tesla employee, devoted fan of Elon Musk and owner of a Tesla Model 3. He died in 2022 when his Model 3 collided with a tree and caught fire.
• The passenger survived, and said that the FSD was engaged at the time of the crash. The deceased's wife confirmed that he used the FSD frequently
• If true, this is the first reported death caused by FSD. There are other stories but they are murkier on if the driver or the FSD were primarily at fault.
• Hans was drunk at the time of the accident (three times the legal limit) but Colorado State Patrol says it doesn't look like a regular drunk driving crash as there was no evidence the brakes were engaged but there was evidence that power was still going to the wheels after the crash. There is no evidence of sudden maneuvering and the State Patrol concluded it was consistent with driver assistance being turned on
• Hans died from smoke inhalation and thermal injuries, and it's probable he would have survived the crash had it not been an EV and thus not had a lithium battery.
• Per Washington Post, the widow's first contact with Tesla after the death was an email saying her husband was fired.

A bit to unpack I know. Obviously the driver being drunk and behind the wheel is a terrible idea. Given the deceased's adoration for Elon Musk his wife is reasonably saying that he had absolute faith in Musk's wild promises of FSD's capabilities and didn't read the fine print. That there was no sign of sudden user intervention is interesting, there are stories of Tesla's having to be stopped from swerving or turning into collisions so if the driver is too out of it to notice then this is highly plausible. Interesting that this would be the first confirmed case of FSD causing a fatality, by sheer balance of probabilities I would have assumed a provable fatality would have already happened.

Edited by Shaoken on Feb 16th 2024 at 8:50:12 PM

Gonna note: Musk is claiming on Twitter that FSD wasn’t even installed (which is a little weird, given that the other people involved said it was) and given that Musk is going on recently about stuff like “imagine thinking the news is real”, that he has a very proven track record of bad impulse control and of saying absolute bullshit on Twitter and has a vested interest in trying to make sure no one thinks FSD is bad (also, like, FUCKING CHANGE THE NAME OF THE PROGRAM if it’s not actually full self driving), so I’m just instantly dismissing anything he says about this.

He could be right…but given the company’s behaviour around this in general (probably driven by him) and given that he really desperately needs the stock price to stay high (and a proven deadly crash caused entirely by FSD would likely dent the stock value quite a bit), he is one of the last people who could be trusted to be honest about it.

With the “confirmed fatality” thing, there’s still a lot of question marks about that “if the car thinks a crash is about to happen, it hands control back to the driver just barely early enough that it can’t be blamed” thing and whether it’s actually happening or not. Tesla’s never managed to definitively prove that’s not what’s happening. And given that the same system provably breaks the law in other ways, it might really do that.

And before anyone says that Musk wouldn’t be dumb enough to lie about this or that he wouldn’t say anything that could have consequences in court, remember, this is the guy who waived due diligence with the twitter purchase, one of the single dumbest things you could ever possibly do in a purchase contract, against the advice of basically everyone, and ended up massively overpaying for Twitter as a result. He’s 100% dumb enough.

Edited by Zendervai on Feb 16th 2024 at 7:14:54 AM

Let's not conflate things. Musk's hypothetical malice or incompetence aside, FSD is beta software and the user agrees to actively supervise it and assume all risk while it is in operation. A Tesla employee should know this better than anyone.

Operating a vehicle while drunk is illegal, not to mention suicidally stupid, whether you have driver-assist software active or not.

Still telling that Musk is trying to deny FSD was even on.

Tesla has the data. This is an objective fact, not a matter of opinion.

Edit: I read the Futurism article. The Business Insider one wants me to register an account, which I don't feel like doing. Anyway, the article is salted with biased language and provides no evidence to back up any of its allegations. So it's a nullity, a nothingburger.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 16th 2024 at 8:41:52 AM

Tesla may have the data...but Tesla isn't saying anything. Elon Musk is. This is part of why it's such a bad idea for him to be the spokesperson for the company, because he himself is a proven moron, is known to lie and appears to genuinely not understand why things like lying even matter in legal contexts. Again, he bought Twitter almost specifically because he waived due diligence, a thing literally no lawyer ever will tell you to do.

"Tesla has the data", okay, and all we have is Elon Musk saying Tesla has the data in a tweet and not actually sharing it. He's not actually doing anything to prove himself right and, in fact, is actively weakening his own position because he's surrounding it with tweets saying things like "Imagine the news is real ". Like, it's not a jump, at all, to the idea that maybe he's not telling the truth and is trying to get his followers to ignore the news stories? If Tesla was truly not at all at fault (and was somehow able to get around the "standard use" concept), why would Musk be attacking the concept of news?

Also, you're really going to say that witness statements from people who were in the car isn't evidence? Like, that it's impossible for them to be correct about it? I would need Tesla to release actual concrete evidence that Musk's claims that the guy hadn't even installed FSD (like, seriously, that sounds like a real stretch, he was somehow letting the self-parking thing drive the car?) are accurate. Because right now, we have people who knew the guy, and his wife, saying that he really overused the FSD system and it was causing his wife a ton of stress, and we have Musk going "he never installed it at all, imagine the news being real ".

I don't know, I think maybe the people who were under the impression the car was driving itself because they were in the car when it was driving itself might not be lying? What the fuck do they even get out of it? The woman's husband is dead and Tesla's first contact with her was "by the way, your husband no longer works for us." Like...no, that doesn't make me believe Musk without actual hard evidence.

Edited by Zendervai on Feb 16th 2024 at 8:42:53 AM

The Futurism article also links to a Washington Post article covering the fatality.

Transplanting my edit. The Washington Post article has more objective writing and better information, and I don't have to log in to read it.

• The vehicle had previously had difficulty navigating the mountain road while on FSD, according to the driver and passenger.
• As noted, there were no signs that the driver attempted to correct its errant course, and the car apparently kept attempting to drive after the impact.
• Tesla stated that it did not receive telemetry from the vehicle due to the remote location, so could not confirm whether FSD was in use at the time.
• The driver had three times the legal limit of alcohol in his blood.

This is a tragic incident but I don't think we can reasonably lay the blame entirely, or even mostly, on Tesla. It's one of those cases of multiple factors, none of which is an obvious, distinct cause.

Look, I'm not going to defend Musk's behavior any more, but when we make these discussions about him, they become useless.

So Tesla did not have the data.

If Tesla has no data (and Musk's initial response was to say FSD was not installed which he then walked back on), that means that the strongest evidence is the actual witness accounts, because Tesla...well, has no proof their system wasn't involved.

But I think the strongest reason to think Musk/Tesla's response is off is that Musk's main reaction to it hitting the mainstream news was going "Imagine thinking the news is real " which...have to be honest, I have a really hard time understanding as anything but him expecting it to be really bad news for Tesla so trying to get people to ignore it.

Edited by Zendervai on Feb 16th 2024 at 8:47:59 AM

Yeah, turns out I was wrong. It usually does, but this was not a usual case. But it does make Musk's claim reckless and even potentially litigable if there were a lawyer willing to take it on. Being drunk, though... it poisons any potential trial.

Look, Zendervai. No matter how much you wish otherwise, the legal system won't take on cases like this where liability is ambiguous. You need evidence to prove cases, not hypotheticals.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 16th 2024 at 8:49:16 AM

The problem Tesla is inevitably going to have is the "reasonable use" thing.

This is part of the reason it's so hard to enforce EULA documents, because it's known and provable that almost no one actually reads those, and the people using them know that no one reads them. So it's unenforceable because everyone involved knows that no one involved has actually read them.

Those disclaimers you get in cars when you start them up, how many of them can you prove people actually read? Do people at Tesla genuinely think that drivers read through them whenever they show up?

The other problem is that the program is called Full Self Driving when it's literally not Full Self Driving and it's very, very easy to take the disclaimers as "oh, they're just trying to dodge liability, but it works fine". If it had been called anything else, this problem wouldn't exist, but the result is that it comes off like "Try out our Full Self Driving! Itisnotfullselfdriving" But if they'd called it like TeslaDrive and didn't make the claim about it's capabilities the name, most of this stuff would evaporate and wouldn't be a problem. Because it turns into "so if it can't do this, why do you call it this?"

And, I'm not going to stop on this front: Tesla primarily speaking through Musk extremely poisons the well, and it's only going to get worse. The guy makes shit up all the time and is buying into ever more extreme conspiracy theories, apparently with complete conviction. How do I know his judgement isn't just fully compromised at this point? He's the main spokesperson, and when the main spokesperson is sharing really gross anti trans, anti-refugee and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and telling everyone to ignore the news and he's the person I'm supposed to believe? I need hard evidence for me to believe any of his claims at this point. If someone behaves like a delusional racist and queerphobic jackass all the time, I'm supposed to just take things at face value when it happens to relate to a car company where he very clearly and desperately needs the stock price to stay high?

Edited by Zendervai on Feb 16th 2024 at 9:02:12 AM

Nobody reads disclaimers or user agreements in their entirety. Anyone who does claim they do is full of it.

Edited by M84 on Feb 16th 2024 at 10:06:27 PM

The other element is that Tesla is now stuck in a position where they can't actually prove they're not at fault and even if it's not taken to court, it's going to hang over them in the public opinion sphere. The way they treated the man's wife really won't help here.

And this was something Tesla itself did. It wasn’t Musk who sent the widow that callous and badly timed message.

"Tesla is possibly responsible for a death in a way they can't disprove and then they told the man's widow to go fuck herself" is a nasty look and it's not something they can escape because...they really can't prove their system isn't at fault and they really were extremely cruel to a grieving widow for literally no reason. They don't benefit from behaving like that at all.

It actually drags attention to what their normal policies are around a death in a way I doubt they want.

Edited by Zendervai on Feb 16th 2024 at 9:26:06 AM

The article says that the widow was eventually given money to relocate, and while the timing of the termination notice may have been unfortunate, none of that has anything to do with the topic of this thread, which is self-driving cars.

"Tesla and/or Elon Musk were meanies" is off-topic and irrelevant.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 16th 2024 at 9:56:11 AM

Why is this only hitting the news now when the crash was in 2022?

I guess, because it's only now that it comes out that it was on "Full Self-Driving" at the moment of the crash?

I also find it sus that they would blame the lithium ion, when uhhh petrol also very much burns....

That tends to be a go to give away that an article is aproaching the topic from a predetermined veiw of "new technology bad" rather then investigative inegrity.

Edited by Imca on Feb 17th 2024 at 2:03:30 AM

At least in aircraft, there is good evidence that lithium battery fires are much more explosive than kerosene fires, and easier to ignite outside of crash scenarios. That doesn't necessarily extend to petrol, but I wouldn't assume that a petrol fire is the same as a lithium battery fire.

I think the bigger question is whether the self-driving software was indeed responsible for the crash or its consequences. The articles do not explicitly say it does. I can imagine a scenario where a drunk person was perceptive enough to note that they can't drive the car, but not perceptive enough to know that the Tesla self-driving thingy isn't yet ready for fully autonomous driving. Which is less a problem with the technology and more with Tesla's labelling/advertising of how it works.

Electric vehicle batteries catch fire up to ten times less frequently than gasoline engines; there is empirical, statistical evidence of this. When they burn, they burn hotter and are more difficult to extinguish. It is nearly impossible to prove that any given crash would be more or less survivable in a vehicle with a particular power source, so that's a red herring.

The problem with rationally examining crashes and fatalities in which self-driving may have been involved is that so many of them also involve driver inattention or impairment. It is difficult to argue that the outcome would have been the same had this guy not been drunk off his ass. Any attempt to prove liability in a court of law would run into this barrier, which is why no lawyers would take the case.

"My husband didn't look drunk"... sorry, lady. That's not a legal argument. I have great sympathy for your trauma and loss, but this was your husband's fault. Don't drink and drive. Don't drink and operate an SAE Level 2 self-driving car, especially one using beta software, on a hazardous road where you have previously experienced faults in its performance.

A Tesla employee has less excuse than a "reasonable person" (as is the usual standard in these cases) not to understand the limitations of FSD Beta, so you can't even make a credible claim of ignorance. "He was an Elon Musk worshipper." Okay, but that has no relevance. "Elon Musk BAD" is not a cogent legal argument.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 16th 2024 at 12:41:45 PM

While I can't speak for US driving law, in Switzerland "my husband didn't look drunk" is actually a point worth noting. One, not all people get drunk at the same promillage, and that you can tell by their looks and behaviour. Two, alcohol tests can have errors, especially postmortem.

And in Switzerland, we'd probably ask whether the software was doing the right thing at the crash. Sometimes it's just bad luck. Sometimes there is a flaw in the software. Sometimes the software isn't designed for a given situation and then the question is whether anyone should have known that going in.

I figure in Switzerland, there'd be a good case to be made that Tesla acted negligently (and depending on how unkind the plaintiff/judge/prosecutors are feeling: deceptively) when they call a software that needs an alert human to operate "full self-driving". Legal minutiae of the "it was in the fine print!" do not always fly. I certainly can see a lawyer taking up such a case, and wouldn't write off their odds of success.

Yeah, like I said, the name is misleading.

If you sell a drink and name it Cancer Cure and put in tiny print “this does not cure cancer”, that can actually land under misleading advertising. It’s why most products aren’t really “exactly what it says on the tin” when it’s not just a food. Especially since a lot of people would see Cancer Cure and not look that close.

It’s also why you get stuff like products naming themselves Cheez Whiz because they can’t really call themselves cheese.

Tesla calling the software “Full Self Driving” means they’re telling everyone who doesn’t bother to look into the fine print that they have a full self driving car. If they called it something that landed within the Tesla brand (like “TeslaDrive” or whatever), this issue wouldn’t exist. Because instead of the absolute word salad that is “Full Self Driving is not full self driving”, going “TeslaDrive is merely an assistant at this point” is a lot easier to parse and feels less like the person saying it is trying to bamboozle you somehow.