From watching a number of videos, I'm also under the impression that Autopilot is currently still so unreliable that the average beta tester of the system is overall _more_ attentive (and often more stressed) to the road than they would otherwise be, so they can intervene in questionable cases or even just override otherwise embarrassing road maneuvers.

Given that the typical Autopilot ride has multiple disengagements that also makes it really hard to judge the performance of the system properly - if you always have to have a hyper-ready human waiting in the wings to catch mistakes to produce nice stats, that's certainly still far away from what most people want in such a system. You'd need to demonstrate better safety without disengagements and without a human backup, as the human drivers you compare to don't have one, either.

Marques Brownlee demonstrated this nicely in a recent video review of his daily work commute using Autopilot.

Fun fact: most people believe they're a safer than the average driver. Many people even believe this while driving drunk. Unless we start putting interlocks on all cars (which isn't entirely hypothetical[0]), they're just going to keep driving around drunk. Would you rather they drive drunk, or have an imperfect system that's better than drunk them, driving a car that also has an AEB (Automatic Emergency Braking) system?

[0] https://www.motortrend.com/news/anti-drunk-driving-technolog...

And of course the pragmatic reality is that nearly everybody considers themselves "better than average."

Tesla isn't merely competing with the actual average human driver, they're competing with the average human driver's unrealistically rosy perception of their own driving prowess.