[trca]

That's a staunch overreaction. You're correct in saying that you can equate Tesla's auto-steer and adaptive cruise control to the autopilot in an airplane, however what you fail to account for is that in an airplane operating on autopilot, the pilots are still required by law to be attentive and paying full attention to the system. This is very similar to how Tesla portrays current-generation of autopilot. Sure, their marketing team does state that all cars are capable of self-driving (i.e. they have the required hardware bar HW3 processor), but they never state that current generation cars are self-driving currently. It's on consumers to understand this difference and pay full attention while driving. My mom was a flight attendant on a major U.S. airline until a few years ago, and it wasn't uncommon at all to hear of a an autopilot system malfunctioning ever-so-slightly in that it steers slightly off-course due to a miscalibrated sensor but, since the pilots are actively paying attention, this error never puts the lives of those onboard the plane in-danger. I would say that Tesla's software should be held to the same standard, in that the operator is required and absolutely needs to pay full attention to the system, but there is no need for Tesla to "disabl[e] autopilot on every single Model S and Model 3 sold until the issue is found and fixed"

[gambiting]

If anything, it's underreaction - not only Tesla should disable the autopilot on all their models temporarily, there should be heavy fines for both allowing it on the roads in this state and for calling it autopilot in the first place.

>>It's on consumers to understand this difference and pay full attention while driving.

Then this is a crazy assumption to be making. Like literally crazy. Pilots are trained over and over again to pay attention - and they still fall asleep during flights. With cars, even engineers who are employed and paid(!!!) to pay attention have fallen asleep while testing level 3 autonomy[0]. Expecting a regular customer to both understand the difference and pay attention is wishful thinking. The lowest bar for this technology that we should be aiming for is "the vehicle should never under any circumstances fail to observe and react to a stationary object in front of itself". Simple as that. If Tesla's autopilot cannot meet this bar it shouldn't be on the road, no matter how many times safer on average it is than a regular driver.

[0] https://www.thedrive.com/tech/7730/ford-engineers-are-fallin...