[qwer]

Relatively few, but they're everywhere -- Auto-pilot on airplanes. ABS brakes. Self-driving cars.

"Releasing early", in the sense of getting these things into the real world as early as possible so they can be iterated on with real-world data is actually pretty crucial if you think about it.

Before self-driving cars hit public urban areas, self-driving trucks have been working on private mining roads (https://qz.com/874589/rio-tinto-is-using-self-driving-416-to...). Auto-pilot on airplanes can still today be turned off or on as desired.

The key here is figuring out how to release gently. The greater the risk, the more iteratively and more gently you should be releasing. If you were building landing gear controllers for passenger planes and your plan for release was to spend a really long time planning really carefully, testing like crazy in non-real-world conditions and finally doing a world-wide, all-commercial flight roll-out at once, I'm likely to pass on air travel for a while (and keep a lookout overhead).

When people talk about releasing early, they're not talking about big bang releases at all. There are alphas, betas, feature toggles, a/b tests, and dark paths for a reason.