I am surprised that proponents of Tesla and autopilot fail to see that the statistics presented are just not good enough. How is 85000 successful test runs of autopilot on that road good enough? Ask any engineer dealing with mass manufacturing and that number will seem shallow from a six sigma process perspective.
Any accidents involving autopilot are far more significant that human caused accidents not only because of the drastically fewer number of cars running autopilot compared to normal cars but also because the system is meant to be much more superior if it is allowed to run on a public road.
If I have my kids in the car with me then I try to be as far away as I can from a Tesla on the road. The lack of regulation in their case is appalling. The statistics have to be far stronger than what is being stated currently for allowing their systems to be run on public roads.
It’s an outrage that people keep dying and Tesla is allowed to keep using its customers as guinea pigs calling their experimental set of driver assist features “Autopilot”. It doesn’t matter how many disclaimers you provide, an example should be made out of this and all the bro companies (yes looking at you Uber) with complete disregard for proper testing and safety. Testing such early technology on public roads using regular people tricked into thinking they are using mature technology should really be illegal and I hope they get punished harshly.
There’s a very high chance that the driver would have been fine if they had been actively driving. How would you think about this if the brakes failed? The steering system? Just because there are other accidents it doesn’t mean that Tesla can’t potentially be blamed for killing this person because of the low maturity of their system.
Blamed yes! Absolutely! Put to the fires to figure out the fault and fix it forever, definitely! Insurance should be paying out and checks for criminal intent followed as it would normally be for a human
Should it stop all progress though, no. No way. Not by a long shot.
Here's another difference - The fix to this issue, unless it's a standard mechanical failure that any other car might have, will fix this issue in all of their cars. A human driver may still right this second lock their wheels in a skid and t-bone another car. The ability for the car to pump the brakes to slow more rapidly had to be a hardware fix rolled out over decades in the form of ABS. With autonomous cars for this to (hopefully) never be an issue again it's tomorrow's software patch