Oblivious Truck Driver Kills Man Driving Tesla

My headline just doesn't have the zip of the New York Times headline: "Self-Driving Tesla Was Involved in Fatal Crash, U.S. Says." The news outlets are reporting this as, "A man died when his Tesla broadsided a semi while he was watching a Harry Potter movie."

As a programmer, I have been skeptical of self-driving cars since Google started talking about them a few years ago. The question of liability if someone is killed is a legal rats nest, as we are now seeing.

From the New York Times article:

The death is a blow to Tesla at a time when the company is pushing to expand its product lineup from expensive electric vehicles to more mainstream models. The company on Thursday declined to say whether the technology or the driver or either were at fault in the accident.

The thing is, it's not complicated at all: the driver of the truck is at fault!

The crash occurred at the intersection of Highway US-27A and NE 140th Court in Williston, Fla. Here's a diagram:

 

The truck (V01) was turning left in front of the oncoming Tesla (V02). If you look at the Google Street view of that intersection from the point of view of the truck that was turning, you'll notice that the truck even had a YIELD sign.

The driver of the Tesla clearly had the right of way: the truck turned left directly in front of him, causing the crash.

I'm not sure why all the news stories failed to note this, or why Tesla declined to say whether the driver or the car was at fault: the truck driver killed the Tesla driver by obliviously turning left in front of oncoming traffic.

Insurance companies deal with this kind of thing all the time. They assign some percentage of blame to each driver: to the truck driver for ignoring the YIELD sign, and the Tesla driver for not seeing the truck in the way. But since the truck driver violated the law by failing to yield, he is at fault.

Now, I'm not defending the Tesla driver's stupidity. Clearly he was an idiot for watching a movie while driving down the highway. But this kind of crash happens every day to people who are distracted for the briefest moment by eating a sandwich, drinking coffee, talking on their cellphones, flashing LCD billboards on the roadside, or glints of blinding light from the setting sun; you can't blame the victim when some idiot fails to yield the right of way and turns right into their path.

This is why I'm still of the opinion that there's too much crap going on on regular streets for computers to drive cars autonomously in traffic. The infrastructure is completely inadequate: road markings aren't clearly defined. Maps can never keep up with detours and construction. Delivery trucks stop in the middle of the street and double park. Drivers make sudden turns without signaling. Morons fail to properly secure cargo, which falls off and causes accidents. Pedestrians dart out from between cars and bikes whiz through intersections.

Computers are good at doing things that their programmers have anticipated. I'm sure they'd do fine in a controlled system where the vehicles run on tracks closed to human traffic, are programmed with all the speed limits and rules, and can communicate with each other to avoid collisions (something like Personal Rapid Transit).

But when you introduce stupid, impatient, irrational, oblivious humans into the mix, and put them in control of 40-ton vehicles of mass destruction, the computer will never be able to make the "right choice."