It's hard to tell because the camera is at such a weird angle, but from what I can see the vehicle remains pretty firmly behind the stop line throughout the entire encounter. We can quibble about how fast it was accelerating, but I regularly see worse false starts at lights.
> When this car made this mistake, someone else (Elon) had to stop it. These are not equivalent. In the former case you can argue no accident was going to happen, but in the latter you can't.
I'm actually more worried about the human case than the human+autonomous case. In the human case it is up to the entity that made the mistake to correct their own mistake. In the autonomous vehicle case you effectively have a second set of eyes as long as the driver is paying attention (which they should be and Musk was). This is why I say that it makes a difference that this was internal testing—the driver wasn't a dumb consumer trusting the vehicle, it was the CEO of the company who knew he was using in-progress software.
> This is on a public road. Try pulling this off (well, please don't) in medicine and see how it goes.
Requiring that autonomous vehicles never be tested on a public road in real world conditions is another way of saying that you do not believe autonomous vehicles should ever exist. At some point they have to be tested in the real world, and they will make mistakes when they leave the controlled conditions of a closed course.