Don’t matter in WA State. You’ll still be charged with vehicular homicide if your Tesla FSD kills someone.
{{ In Washington, state troopers responded to the scene of Nissen’s death. In the aftermath of the crash, his damaged bike lay on the road beside the Tesla as police worked to divert traffic. A trooper described in his report how he retrieved a yellow blanket to cover the body.
Police took Hunter, the Tesla driver into custody, jailing him on a vehicular homicide charge under existing distracted driving laws. Hunter did not respond to a request for comment.
Chris Loftis, a state patrol spokesman, said in an email that no matter what features a vehicle is equipped with, “the driver is ALWAYS responsible to operate the vehicle in a safe and legal manner.” }}
It’s important to understand the difference between autopilot and FSD. Autopilot is literally cruise control (with lane keeping), it is not any form of self driving other than staying in the lane, maintaining the set speed, and keeping a safe distance from the vehicle in front of it. Nearly all modern cars have this feature available in various trim levels. And cruise control doesn’t stop for bicycles, red lights, etc. FSD, on the other hand, does almost all the driving tasks, it stops at lights and stop signs, it obeys yield signs, it merges, it enters and exits, it turns, it changes lanes when needed, it avoids pedestrians and bicycles, it slows when it sees emergency lights ahead, etc.
And I’ve always opposed the stupid name Tesla came up with for their glorified cruise control system. And heck, I also oppose the stupid name they came up with for their self driving system, because it is not ‘F’, and it is not "S’, it is only ‘D’.
Current law is based on cars with drivers. FSD has been updated from “beta” to “supervised” and that means that an attentive driver is still required. Once FSD is recognized as safe enough without a driver the law needs to be updated.
Sooner than you think. Most people don’t appreciate the power of the phase transition from heuristic to neural network based AI and sufficient computer power to crunch the incoming data. I’m convinced that the current upheaval at Tesla was motivated by this phase transition which brings not just FSD and RoboTaxis much sooner but also the Optimus robot which should be a bigger moneymaker than RoboTaxis.
The Tony Seba video I posted showed that it took 13 years for cars to replace horses in New York and that the technology adoption “S” curves have grown much steeper. How long? Three to five years? It’s going to be a race between economic superpowers, USA, China, EU.