"He's having a heart attack, should we call an ambulance? Nah, shove him in his Tesla and set a route for the hospital, they'll sort it out there".
Having more ways to get somebody to the hospital is better than having less of them.
It's just like with knifes. Yes, some people will find a way to hurt themselves using them, but that's not really a good argument to get rid of them.
If he was having a serious cardiac issue, who's to know if the ER that he pulls into has a cardiac cath lab or really, anything above suturing and simple obstetrics services. Different hospitals have different capabilities. That's what worries me about this whole thing.
We've had stories here about people thinking their friend was having a heart attack, so they were speeding down the highway at twice the speed limit to try to get to a hospital. What the driver didn't know was that he had passed up two different ERs with higher levels of care than the hospital he was speeding to.
I still prefer people pull over and call 911.
Seriously, this is the worst kind of strawman, pretending reading about a single case of something will change how people behave in an emergency.
The main characteristic of established protocols in the event of an emergency are that they are supposed to be reliable and not require complex computation on the part of the user.
I doubt any sane person (simple metric: those who would call the ambulance instead of driving the person to the hospital in current times), would be more likely to use the autopilot feature instead of calling an ambulance.
Yes there will always be dumb people till posterity, but to claim people are more likely to abuse the feature than current rates is nonsense.