Criminal liability aside, if I am in a wheelchair all my life, requiring expensive medical care, someone will need to pay for that. So civil liability will need to be sonewhere.
Is that not precisely the point of the current discussion? Currently, the manufacturer is not liable. The liability can not be delegated by the driver.
The manufacturers of a self-driving car can be held and are held liable today, same as if the brakes were defective (strict product liability) or improperly marketed (negligence). That doesn't mean the driver might not also be liable. It all depends on why an accident occurred and a host of other factors. There's really nothing special about self-driving cars in this respect, except that litigation can be much more factually complicated. For failing breaks, it's relatively clear given X speed and Y distance, and assuming they were engaged, whether they worked. Then you work backwards from there. Negligent driving? Poor maintenance (driver or mechanic)? Defective design? But in driver assistance and automation systems there are many more questions about what was actually expected to happen, or what was reasonable to expect to happen.
That second accident looks like it could be one on those typical cases of SDC causing accidents by behaving unexpectedly (like braking for a pedestrian where human drivers would have denied right of way)
I havent read the doc and I am not arguing either way, just saying that you can cause an accident in other ways than by ploughing into someone.
They really can't stop tying themselves into knots to dunk on self driving cars. They don't even know it's the case, they just suspect it's the case. Even if it _were_ the case, the drivers behind them most likely don't have this information available, they probably can't distinguish between "SDV being cautions and giving right of way" and "SDV stopping an immediate impact", they can just see a car in front of them suddnely stopping. So they should stop.
If the pedestrian hasn't gotten to the driveway quite yet, and you're stopping to let them get there and cross out of an abundance of caution, then it may not have been legally required for you to yield. And the motorcyclist behind you could very reasonably have seen the pedestrian too (and reasoned that the pedestrian was still several seconds away from getting to the driveway) and not expected you to stop. In such a situation, such an abundance of caution could have easily "caused" an accident, in that not yielding and proceeding through would have been perfectly safe.
(I'm of course being steel-manning GP's argument here, it could have very easily been that the pedestrian was already crossing the driveway at that point, I didn't see the video. Point is, "more caution" doesn't always mean "less chance of an accident".)
> Point is, "more caution" doesn't always mean "less chance of an accident"
that's a fair point. For example, if you're on a highway and traffic is moving at 80mph however the speed limit is 55mph and so you're driving 55 you're doing way more harm than good. Becoming an obstacle to traffic makes an accident more likely regardless of whether you're right or wrong.
Having said that, I do not see the waymo at fault here at all. The other car driver turned a minor accident into a fatality without involving the waymo, pedestrian, or even the motorcyclist. They were just not paying attention and ran over the poor person.
This is exactly the type of nuance that the comparison fails on. Plus we have limited info here.
Yes ofc we must yield to pedestrians. And we also make nuanced decisions. "There's a motorcycle moving too fast behind me. There's a pedestrian in front of me."
If the pedestrian would be killed or struck by the vehicle, then yes you need to stop and/or steer away. But if it's about merely inconveniencing the pedestrian to prevent an accident, that's the ethical duty.
That's the nuance the rule "always yield to pedestrians" needs to consider.
Hi. This position is utterly idiotic, even if you were just trying to steel-man it. If a self-driving car can "cause" accidents by yielding to crosswalks then the only sensible course of action is to immediately ban human drivers in cities, starting this morning, zero exceptions, no tolerance.
Classe Préparatoire. When you quit kindergarden and enter ‘real school’. Age 6
I guess it is meant as hyperbole, though I read NRC, Le Monde and NYT and can confirm that le Monde is the leading newspaper of France but it is not the newspaper it was. Mostly opinion and lifestyle, not a lot of investigative or even just in-depth journalism. Mostly preaching (some of it for causes I happen to agree with, but still)
Yes, I suppose it's expected to accuse a newspaper of being not high minded enough, and use a childish level of tease. Anyway....
The investigative journalism is still there - they're usually on the same big international stories as the guardian or NYT (which, okay, I get it are not enough to the left to be considered serious in this thread, we get it. Meanwhile the vast majority of people think they're red bastion and watch hard right "news" tv channels and tiktok reals, but let's all pretend it's the same thing to continue feeling smug about ourselves.)
However, they're VERY bad at putting those "deep" article in the front page of the website. The "paper" paper does a better job - when a 10 lines articles sits next to a full pager, you get a sense of hierarchy.
When there is only the title on the front page, you don't get this.
Also, they have "live threads" for everything , and "alerts" for anything.
They live closer by? So less miles travelled, and in many cases travelled by train? Depending on how you generate electricity that works out quite differently.
Went to Venice by night train 15 years ago, would definitely recommend.
Conversely, however, perhaps we should question Europeans massively going to Phuket.
Even if you watch « only » 5 shows, if they are on five different services then that means 5 subscriptions.
Or you spend time planning and organizing subscriptions.
.. or you just download them.
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