[salawat]

They aren't assuming. If you aren't radiating and measuring the return, you're at a massive disadvantage in terms of your sensor package. It's s bit like trusting a computer to drive at 70 mph on a pitch black stretch of highway it has never seem before. Enjoy overdriving your headlights and hitting a deer or something else.

Tesla is cutting corners by eschewing a well-known technology that will increase the fidelity of their autonomous driving system. That is irresponsible.

[nickik]

Its only irresponsible if they actually sell anything that doesn't work. So far what the offer is fine for what it is. People who don't want to wait can get their money back at any time.

[salawat]

If you define working as "encouraging drivers to drive in a more disengaged state, while at the same time adding additional sources of hazard or malfunction for both the disengaged driver, and other motorists to be alert for", then I got nothing that'll seemingly convince you, as it appears we'd be arguing right past each other.

Do. No. Harm. It isn't just for Doctors. You can't sit on the positivist side of the fence and say, "Bah, it'll never happen."

It always does. When the cost is lives, you don't mess around or skimp. Closer to Perfection over pretty good is 100% justifiable in safety critical applications. In many cases, critical systems are redundantly reinforced.

Look up risk compensation to understand why a half-baked solution is almost guaranteed to be worse. If you are still relying on the human to compensate for failures in a system in an environment where response time to live is measured in seconds, you might as well just have them being alert and engaged at all times with as few things to have to compensate for malfunctioning as possible.

Another somewhat tangential demonstration of this is observable in nuclear reactor design, and utilising delayed fission product neutrons to attain criticality. This slows down the timescale over which things can go horribly wrong to the scale of minutes instead of seconds that would make avoiding prompt criticality highly problematic.