but tesla is the operator

Or at some point subscribing to a service may be easier than owning the damn thing.

Ah, but could one not argue that the owner of the self-driving car is _not_ the operator, and it is the car, or perhaps Tesla, which operates it?

    > Quite likely this year we will have federal law that will allow selling cars with fully unsupervised self-driving, in which case the insurance/liability will obviously land on the maker of the system, not person present in the car.

Tacking "Supervised" on the end of "Full Self Driving" is just contradictory. Perhaps if it was "Partial Self Driving" then it wouldn't be so confusing.

I imagine insurance would be split in two in that case. Carmakers would not want to be liable for e.g. someone striking you in a hit-and-run.

You can sell autonomous vehicles to consumers all day long. There's no US federal law prohibiting that, as long as they're compliant with FMVSS as all consumer vehicles are required to be.

Waymo is also a livery service which you normally aren’t liable for as a passenger of taxi or limousine unless you have deep pockets. /IANAL

> Quite likely this year we will have federal law that will allow selling cars with fully unsupervised self-driving, in which case the insurance/liability will obviously land on the maker of the system, not person present in the car.

This is news to me. This context seems important to understanding Tesla's decision to stop selling FSD. If they're on the hook for insurance, then they will need to dynamically adjust what they charge to reflect insurance costs.

I see. So not Tesla's product they are using to sell insurance around isn't "Full Self-Driving" or "Autonomous" like the page says.

Without LIDAR and/or additional sensors, Tesla will never be able to provide "real" FSD, no matter how wonderful their software controlling the car is.

Also, self driving is a feature of a vehicle someone owns, I don't understand how that should exempt anyone from insuring their property.

Waymo and others are providing a taxi service where the driver is not a human. You don't pay insurance when you ride Uber or Bolt or any other regular taxi service.

Can a third party reprogram my dog or child at any moment? Or even take over and control them?

Cruise control is hardly relevant to a discussion of liability for autonomous vehicle operation.

I’ve said for years that pragmatically, our definition of a “person” is an entity that can accept liability and take blame.

> if autonomous vehicles become common and are a lot safer than manual driven vehicles, insurance rates for human driven cars could wind up exploding as the risk pool becomes much smaller and statistically riskier.

The assumption there is that the remaining human drivers would be the higher risk ones, but why would that be the case?

One of the primary movers of high risk driving is that someone goes to the bar, has too many drinks, then needs both themselves and their car to get home. Autonomous vehicles can obviously improve this by getting them home in their car without them driving it, but if they do, the risk profile of the remaining human drivers improves. At worst they're less likely to be hit by a drunk driver, at best the drunk drivers are the early adopters of autonomous vehicles and opt themselves out of the human drivers pool.

The fact you think $200 per month is sane is amusing to people in other countries

Not "currently," "used to": https://www.theverge.com/transportation/860935/mercedes-driv...

It was way too limited to be useful to anyone.

Sounds like it's neither self-driving, nor autonomous, if I'm on the hook if it goes wrong.

Who’s the “operator” of an “autonomous” car? If I sit in it and it drives me around, how am I an “operator”?

The point is if the liability is always exclusively with the human driver then any system in that car is at best a "driver assist". Claims that "it drives itself" or "it's autonomous" are just varying degrees of lying. I call it a partial lie rather than a partial truth because the result more often than not is that the customer is tricked into thinking the system is more capable than it is, and because that outcome is more dangerous than the opposite.

Any car has varying degrees of autonomy, even the ones with no assists (it will safely self-drive you all the way to the accident site, as they say). But the car is either driven by the human with the system's help, or is driven by the system with or without the human's help.

A car can't have 2 drivers. The only real one is the one the law holds responsible.

Yep, you bought it, you own it, you choose to operate it on the public roads. Therefore your liability.

I don't think Tesla lets you buy FSD

well it's the risk, the combination ..

it's why young drivers pay more for insurance

That is the case everywhere. It is common when buying a product for the contract to include who has liability for various things. The price often changes by a lot depending on who has liability.

Cars are traditionally sold as the customer has liability. Nothing stops a car maker (or even an individual dealer) from selling cars today taking all the insurance liability in any country I know of - they don't for what I hope are obvious reasons (bad drivers will be sure to buy those cars since it is a better deal for them an in turn a worse deal for good drivers), but they could.

Self driving is currently sold as customers has liability because that is how it has always been done. I doubt it will change, but it is only because I doubt there will ever be enough advantage as to be worth it for someone else to take on the liability - but I could be wrong.

Wouldn't that requirement completely kill any chance of a L5 system being profitable? If company X is making tons of self-driving cars, and now has to pay insurance for every single one, that's a mountain of cash. They'd go broke immediately.

I realize it would suck to be blamed for something the car did when you weren't driving it, but I'm not sure how else it could be financially feasible.