A judge has found “reasonable evidence” that Elon Musk and other executives at Tesla knew that the company’s self-driving technology was defective but still allowed the cars to be driven in an unsafe manner anyway, according to a recent ruling issued in Florida.
Palm Beach county circuit court judge Reid Scott said he had found evidence that Tesla “engaged in a marketing strategy that painted the products as autonomous” and that Musk’s public statements about the technology “had a significant effect on the belief about the capabilities of the products”.
The ruling, reported by Reuters on Wednesday, clears the way for a lawsuit over a fatal crash in 2019 north of Miami involving a Tesla Model 3. The vehicle crashed into an 18-wheeler truck that had turned on to the road into the path of driver Stephen Banner, shearing off the Tesla’s roof and killing Banner.
The Wright brothers first flight was less than the wingspan of a Boeing 747, an aircraft with a rang of over 8,000 miles. The Internet was once called a fad.
Autonomous cars will be the future and people will die before they become the defacto method of personal transport. The unwilling sacrifices of a public alpha test of the technology are worth the losses we must endure to achieve the unparalleled safety of ubiquitous autonomous vehicles that mitigate traffic congestion, pedestrian deaths, unwieldy public transit, and the shortcomings of urban sprawl.
The deaths caused by early adoption benefit the greater good and we should be willing to accept their loss as a necessary evil for a greater good.
Not that I would ever trust a computer to drive my car. I will drive my own car until it kills me, financially or literally, but I can see what good an imperfect system struggling with growing pains will create.