[vkou]

What's the point of using it, when I have to stay at the wheel and be alert, and be ready to steer at a moment's notice, while driving a dumb car?

Either I can fully rely on the system to get me from point A to point B, or I have to fully concentrate on driving. People aren't robots - they can't go from half-assed sorta-paying attention to a split-second life-saving reaction.

[drcross]

That's not a fair argument, 1. Cruise control makes cars easier to drive, adaptive cruise control even more so. 2. The end goal is full autonomy anyway; Tesla seems to be the only manufacturer to release incremental updates towards reaching that.

[vkou]

Cruise control is as far from autonomous driving as a piece of graph paper is from being a computer. Nobody has ever described it as a paradigm shift, and its invention did not prompt unsubstantiated speculation about how driverless taxicabs are literally two years away. And yes, from a safety perspective, Tesla's autopilot is no different from cruise control. Keep your hands on the wheel, your feet on the pedals, and constantly pay attention.

Why are you assuming that other manufacturers are not working towards full autonomy? I strongly doubt that everyone at Ford, GM, VW, Toyota, and Honda is asleep at the wheel... Especially when their luxury vehicles are all incrementally moving towards autonomy.

They certainly have a lot fewer PR pieces about how amazing their autonomous-but-not-really lane assist is.

[kalleboo]

> I strongly doubt that everyone at Ford, GM, VW, Toyota, and Honda is asleep at the wheel

Of course not, since only Tesla AutoPilot lets you sleep at the wheel