> If you are doing safety critical
Well, Tesla clearly isn't doing safety critical work on autonomous systems (it wouldn't have even launched "autopilot" if it was), so 4 years is indeed a big lag.
Well, Tesla clearly isn't doing safety critical work on autonomous systems (it wouldn't have even launched "autopilot" if it was), so 4 years is indeed a big lag.
Isn't then the safer thing to release and encourage autopilot to the largest extent possible?
[1] https://www.tesla.com/blog/q3-2018-vehicle-safety-report?red...
Plus, the statistic ignores the fact that responsibility is actually shared between humans and the car. If autopilot gets into an unsafe situation and gives control to the human at the last moment, the car company might claim that the accident happened under human control. We have a long way to go before we can truly understand the safety of semi-autonomous vehicles.
Controlling for all those variables is hard and not to their benefit, thus I'd never expect their pr team to do so. But I wonder if that might even creep into their automated driving stats... e.g. by drivers taking control in dangerous situations.
We have lots of experience with the reverse, where the human drives but the autopilot rips control away when things go wrong. Traction control, radar-triggered braking, even basic ABS is a machine taking over from the human once things get hairy. Several AirForce fighters have systems that will sometimes ignore the pilot's inputs and save the aircraft from a crash. That's the real path for semi-autonomous cars imho: you do all the driving until the robot steps in to save your ass.
(I cannot wait for the day someone tries to sell a car that will automatically obey speed limits regardless of driver input. That's a stock to short.)
Why would you do so?
This is like saying "Let's assume the sky is purple. Then, we can conclude that the sky is purple."