> Should Riad be found guilty, “it’s going to send shivers up and down everybody’s spine who has one of these vehicles and realizes, ‘Hey, I’m the one that’s responsible,’”
Duh. There's plenty of warnings, you are still responsible and your attention is required at all times to intervene when needed.
Of course, there are going to be plenty of situations where it will be too late for a human to intervene. Those are going to look harder, but purely from a legal standpoint you are not (yet) allowed to hand off responsibility to some algorithm just because it's baked into the car you buy.
If you're reversing with the help of a sensor that's always worked before, but this time the sensor fails and you hit someone, it is still your responsibility. On the other hand, if your brakes fail despite you having had a recent service, that wouldn't be your fault. I'm not sure where the dividing line is between those two issues.
One thought is that "always worked before" isn't good enough for engineering. Most engineers are reluctant to approve a design that is based solely on testing.
The brakes are highly engineered, known to be of exceptional reliability, have redundancy, and a dashboard indicator for some known failure modes. In the two cases of brake failure I've experienced, the dashboard lit up like a Christmas tree, and the car was still tolerably manageable. We do adapt our driving habits to the possibility of brake failure, e.g., maintaining a safe following distance, and taking extra care when there's ice.
The backup sensor is designed with the expectation that you are the backup. You were probably told that.
Regulators and insurance companies constantly analyze crash data, so a conclusion of "always worked before" based on widespread stats analyzed by engineers is possibly OK, but not "always worked before" according to the consumer.
Granted, there may be a gray area in between full driver responsibility, and full engineering responsibility. There was a HN thread just yesterday that debated what engineering actually consists of, so there's no pat answer. And no formula for deciding, which is part of the reason why we ultimately have humans deciding, through the court system in the US.
The sensor isn't supposed to be a replacement for looking where you're reversing. It merely tells you the distance so that you can park more accurately. Vehicles that don't have a rear view sound an alarm and flash warning lights while reversing*.
> Should Riad be found guilty, “it’s going to send shivers up and down everybody’s spine who has one of these vehicles and realizes, ‘Hey, I’m the one that’s responsible,’”
Duh. There's plenty of warnings, you are still responsible and your attention is required at all times to intervene when needed. Of course, there are going to be plenty of situations where it will be too late for a human to intervene. Those are going to look harder, but purely from a legal standpoint you are not (yet) allowed to hand off responsibility to some algorithm just because it's baked into the car you buy.