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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.
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?
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.
"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.
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
They have 120k worth of Prius smug. It's overwhelming.
Just like your typing 'assistant'
Having an automated system doesn't mean you don't have to use the preview function before posting.
No sig today...
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"?
A system which functions to assist the driver ("pilot") should instead be named after a person capable of driving (flying) without assistance from the driver (pilot)? Perhaps you should rethink that. Or possible, just think.
Co-pilot suggests it helps, autopilot suggests it does it for you.
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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 ?