In the piece — titled “Can You Fool a Self Driving Car?” — Rober found that a Tesla car on Autopilot was fooled by a Wile E. Coyote-style wall painted to look like the road ahead of it, with the electric vehicle plowing right through it instead of stopping.
The footage was damning enough, with slow-motion clips showing the car not only crashing through the styrofoam wall but also a mannequin of a child. The Tesla was also fooled by simulated rain and fog.
The plaintiff’s lawyers would say, the autopilot was engaged, made the decision to run into the wall, and turned off 0.1 seconds before impact. Liability is not going disappear when there were 4.9 seconds of making dangerous decisions and peacing out in the last 0.1.
these strategies aren’t about actually winning the argument, it’s about making it excessively expensive to have the argument in the first place. Every motion requires a response by the counterparty, which requires billable time from the counterparty’s lawyers, and delays the trial. it’s just another variation on “defend, depose, deny”.
They can also claim with a straight face that autopilot has a crash rate that is artificially lowered without it being technically a lie in public, in ads, etc
Defense lawyers can make a lot of hay with details like that. Nothing that gets the lawsuit dismissed but turning the question into “how much is each party responsible” when it was previously “Tesla drove me into a wall” can help reduce settlement amounts (as these things rarely go to trial).
Which side has more money for lawyers though?