Cars might not be the best example, since human lives are at stake, as in aviation. Unless you work on Teslas autopilot, it seems. But yes, backups and restores are often good enough.
An airliner is a lot of lives, a lot of money, a lot of fuel, and a lot of energy. Which is why a lot has been invested in training, procedure, and safety systems.
Cars operates in an environment which is in most ways a lot more forgiving, they’re controlled by (on average) low-training low-skill non-redundant crews, they’re much more at risk of “enemy action”, the material stresses are in a different realm, and they’re much, much more sensitive to price pressure.
Hell, the difference is already visible in aviation alone, crop dusters and other small planes are a lot less regulated amongst every axis than airliners are.
A whole lot more people die from car accidents, yet there are few reports on national news on accidents. So fewer people care. Meanwhile each time there is an aviation disaster, 100s of people die and it's all over the news for weeks. Similarly with train accidents and nuclear accidents. There where only 2 very large ones but they still haunt the field to this day, while (for example) the deaths from solar installations by people falling from roofs are mostly ignored.
Large accidents have to be avoided, a lot of small ones are more acceptable.
But that is cost/benefit analysis. When any accident can kill hundreds and do millions to billions in damage besides (to say nothing of the image damage to both the sector and the specific brand), the benefit of trying to prevent every accident is significant, so acceptable costs are commensurate.
Which is actually counterproductive! This makes it harder to compete as a bus service, bus lines shut down, and more people drive. I wrote more about this at https://www.jefftk.com/p/make-buses-dangerous and https://www.jefftk.com/p/in-light-of-crashes-we-should-not-m...
I mean you're implying that there are more accidents with autopilot than without it, right? Seems like quite the claim...
Example: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/22/tesla-aut...
The fact is, there’s a lot of history and best practice around building safety critical systems that Tesla doesn’t follow.
Additionally, even with the practices they follow, they call a consumer facing product that isn’t really an autopilot “autopilot”, while focusing outbound comms on a beta product that is more like an autopilot, but not available to them.
A plane pilot knows very well what the limits of the autopilot are and what the passenger believes is irrelevant.
Conversely if too many/most car “autopilot” users believe it does more than what it really does then it’s dangerous.
In electrical engineering 600V is still “low voltage”. Any engineer in the field knows that so that’s fine right? But if someone sells “low voltage” electric toothbrush or hand warmer no normal person will think “it’s 600V, it will probably kill me”. When you sell something, what your target audience takes away from your advertisement matters. If they’re clearly confused and you aren’t clearing it up after so many years then “confusion” and misleading advertising are part of your sales strategy.
Nobody here on HN, because we're really into tech. Outside the tech world, I would guess that 50% of the population thinks that "autopilot" (on any device) means that no human is needed.