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Tesla Owner Attempts Autopilot Defense During DUI Stop (arstechnica.com)
It turns out driving drunk is still illegal, even with a driver-assistance system active. "On Saturday, January 13, police discovered a man in his Tesla vehicle on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge," reports Ars Technica. "The San Francisco Chronicle reports that 'the man had apparently passed out in the stopped car while stuck in the flow of busy bridge traffic at 5:30pm, according to the California Highway Patrol." From the report: When police woke the man up, he assured officers that everything was fine because the car was "on autopilot." No one was injured in the incident, and the California Highway Patrol made a snarky tweet about it. Needless to say, other Tesla owners -- and people who own competing systems like Cadillac's Super Cruise -- should not follow this guy's example. No cars on the market right now have fully driverless technology available. Autopilot, Supercruise, and other products are driver assistance products -- they're designed to operate with an attentive human driver as a backup. Driving drunk using one of these systems is just as illegal as driving drunk in a conventional car.
My fear is that once cars are fully automated, cops will still claim you need to be sober to operate them, and being near your car with the keys will still be worth $25,000 in fines and legal fees.
the eula will make the renter (passenger) liability for any crash even in cars with no controls.
The law has caught up
with Elon's autopilot?
Passenger seat, bro.
What is it with some Tesla owners thinking the laws of physics and the courts somehow don't apply to them.
Organization? You must be joking..
Yes, he was passed out and the car wasn't moving. Under California law, that's still drunk driving. A friend of mine had his car conk out just as he left the Bay Bridge. He was able to roll it over to the curb, park it, and call a tow truck. A CHP officer beat the tow truck to the scene, though, and determined my friend had been drinking. Because he was still sitting in the car while he waited for the tow, he was charged with a DUI in a car that was motionless and would not even start if he tried.
So don't drink and drive, m'kay?
Breakfast served all day!
Where i live, you need to put your key's in the ignition for it to be considered DUI, so its not broad, maybe if person ISN'T in drivers seat for example or (if car/truck has one) back seat?
Damn REGULATIONS you mean. If America was run by pure Libertarianism we could drive as drunk as we want and launder money all the way home! This Trump clown is just a half-measure.
I'm kind of alright with that, insurance will handle the civil liabilities, and things will remain relatively capped on payout (vs what a multi billion dollar company can do).
Though I will need to pay the liability insurance, it will likely reduce the overall cost in payouts of liability for self driving cars, making the insurance cheaper vs GM insuring (or self insuring) for said payouts.
I'm much more concerned about the criminal aspect of riding in an automous (level 4 within it's automous rules) under the influence (or asleep).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I was at a girls house one night drinking with her. Her dad came home, so out the window I was sent. So here I am drunk, and not at home. Knowing the rules were that you couldn't sleep it off in your truck, I ziptied my keys to the trailer hitch, knowing I was not clever enough to get them off if I was drunk.
I am glad I did. A couple hours after I fell asleep in my truck. *knock knock knock* on the window. Hello officer.
We went through what was going on and I told him I had some drinks and was sleeping them off. He started in on telling me he was charging me when I informed him my keys were ziptied to the bumper hitch. He thought it was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. I was let go with a warning not to drink without a ride home.
...The cops are super aggressive about DUI. They will actually come to your house if you're suspected of drunk driving and arrest you if they have any proof you were driving with in the past X hours and fail a breathalizer. That proof could definitely include your vehicle still being warm.
Hell, I've heard cops tell me, if you're drunk and you just go sleep in your car, in a parking lot, you can be arrested for DUI.
"Autopilot saves drunk drivers' life". Assuming he would have driven either way (drunks usually do), if he hadn't had autopilot on when he passed out, the car wouldn't have driven for a few minutes on its own, then pulled slowly to a stop and put the blinkers on. He would just have crashed. Possibly into another car.
Santa Ana Winds: Like the Dustbowl, but with awards shows.
Seems like I recall someone getting a DUI while riding a horse. That would be similar to the Tesla situation, as the horse kinda has an autopilot and would hope it's self-preservation instinct would help keep it out of 'accidents', drunk rider or not.
Where i live, you need to put your key's in the ignition for it to be considered DUI
In most jurisdictions, just having the means to start the vehicle is all they need. So, keys anywhere in or near the car. They will assert that you drove the car there while drunk and parked to sleep it off.
If America was run by pure Libertarianism we could drive as drunk as we want and launder money all the way home!
If it was run by pure Libertarianism you wouldn't NEED to launder your money. (Unless the money got physically dirty and you wanted to clean it up rather than trade it in.)
As for driving drunk: The choice would be yours. But heaven help you if you caused an accident that killed or injured a person or damaged someone else's property. ("Libertarian" doesn't mean "no responsibility for wrongdoing".) You'd still need to "make it right". The property (and incidental damages and inconvenience) you could fix with money. But "making right" a wrongful death or injury is more problematic.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
But there will be cars that can drive unattended in some conditions and locations, but not everywhere, and I'm curious how it will be treated.
They'd be treated as the laws and courts decide. Laws and courts can be arbitrary, but they often are reasonable.
I'd expect that:
* If the self-driving algorithms are recognized as smart enough to pull over, safely park, and insist a driver take over if things are getting to hairy for them, letting the auto-pilot run the car while you're impaired would be fine (provided you don't try to take over if the autopilot doesn't trust itself, or launch it into a situation where you should have known that the algorithms might fail.)
* Riding impaired when a "reasonable and prudent" (and non-impaired) person would trust the autopilot would be OK.
* Letting the auto-pilot take you to a medical facility when you're too out-of-it to drive yourself, as well, would not just be OK but in some cases would let your case win on the "necessity defence" even if the law prohibits it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"Libertarian" doesn't mean "no responsibility for wrongdoing". I agree that it shouldn't. Too bad it does more than not.
In "most juristictions" of retarded gods own land?
How is it with that paradim of 'incocent' until proven 'guilty'?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
This defense wouldn't work for a pilot, not even on a long flight where they could be on autopilot for 10 hours and sober up. There is, AFAIK, no mode of transportation where this defense works since you always have to be ready to take over if the automated system disengages. To think that it would work on cars is pretty ridiculous since such systems are far less advanced for that mode of transportation.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It was a charge. I doubt that, even in Florida, she was convicted: https://nypost.com/2017/11/03/...
It gets worse, though: http://www.newsminer.com/junea...
Back when you used to have two separate keys for the trunk and the ignition, I used to lock my ignition keys in the trunk when I had too much to drink. I got woken up by neighbourhood cops a few times, & one time I was patted down & the interior of the car was searched once but that was sufficient to avoid being charged with a DUI in NY in the 80s.
With cars that you can start with a fob I wouldn't want to try it.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Er... no we don't. Don't believe the hype - an "automated" Tesla car went straight under a lorry without even detecting it. That's nowhere NEAR being able to self-drive. Just because the stats are low at the moment doesn't mean it's representative of what would happen if you classed them as fully automated and let them all loose on the road en-masse.
And liability.
If the system was truly automated, liability would NOT be with the driver at all. It would be with the insurers and the manufacturers. They would have to pay the full costs of every dent, bump, accident and fatality. They don't want that. The reason they don't want that is that they know it's not ready for that yet.
Simply put: We don't have the technology. If you think we do, the manufacturers and insurers don't. That should tell you something.
Also, there are... what? Maybe 250,000 Tesla's on the road, worldwide? There are 1bn cars on the road. That's about 0.025% of cars out there. If all the automated cars models were put together, you'd be lucky to hit 0.05%. Extrapolating from what 0.05% of cars do, when they are sold as driver-responsible, driver-assistance cars and not automated cars (so most people DON'T just use them as automated cars), and then applying that to say we could have fully automated cars "safely" is more than a little misleading.
P.S. in this case, the car decided to block the entire road. Maybe that was "safe" for the driver, but extrapolate that to millions of automated cars with the same kind of handling and watch as the road system collapses because two joining automated cars don't cede to each other proper and neither proceed "for safety" at a point that nobody can pass them.
>("Libertarian" doesn't mean "no responsibility for wrongdoing".)
How do you explain rich bankers getting away with destroying whole economies and receiving a nice exit-fee on top ?
Explain to me when a "Libertarian" government has actually existed and people got away with no responsibility for wrongdoing...
/me waits for Somalia to be dropped.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
No need to go that far. Russia in the early 1990ies was in practice a libertarian paradise since the government was basically powerless, the law enforcement was the best the money could buy and people could get away literally (not figuratively, really literally) with anything if they were able to pay for it.
This is why Putin is so popular there, by the way. People consider a dictatorship better than what amounts to way too much freedom.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Anyone that follows the space knows that Google saw the same damn thing and made the right decision. Level 2 and 3 autonomous is dangerous and shouldn't be used. Elon made a tough situation for himself with the stupid hype cycle. Forcing him to release something that is clearly dangerous and as a result making roads less safe. When google saw what people did in their trials, they immediately shut it down and switched focus to full autonomous. What Tesla did is irresponsible because people will abuse it. It was never a question of "if people will or how many". It was always when and what's the consequences. Google saw that basically everyone abused the system and didn't pay attention. For all the good that Elon has done, releasing the feature prematurely isn't one of his best decisions.
"government was basically powerless" doesn't describe a Libertarian government as most people would categorize it. Most mainstream Libertarians espouse a strong but limited central government. A powerless government and private security describes anarchy.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
They gave somebody a DUI on a horse. I think a horse has a better "autopilot" than a Tesla given that it has a living brain and can navigate the world all by itself...
Nah, it's easy. We just apply a value based on what they deliver to the household. Kids are free, old people aren't bringing in any cash, so when you run them over you should get paid.
Mom's can be replaced with some sort of daycare, we'll price out a cheap one and pay you the equivalent. Wage earners are worth 20 years of pay. Don't worry about inflation or raises, etc.
Voila', a libertarian paradise.
Cheap storage VM.
This describes how a libertarian government would look in the real world instead of wet dreams. Oh, by the way, Russia in the early 1990ies also qualifies because of its economical policies - laissez faire dog eat dog capitalism, privatising everything until all assets were stripped, a total race to the bottom in goods and services, sending countless people into poverty. Anarchy ist just libertarianism brought to its logical conclusion.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
As communism is socialism brought to it's logical conclusion? And an oligarchy is the logical conclusion of democracy?
That is by definition the slippery slope fallacy. That if you are for a small government, then logically the ideal would be no government?
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Not true, you can collect damages. Unless an employer kills them in the course of work, then you have risible caps.
Cheap storage VM.