The source says "light steering inputs if the system senses the vehicle is about to veer off the road." So it sounds like if you're full-on aiming for the ditch it won't really affect you.

I hope no car will ever unexpectedly turn on autopilot in the middle of driving. Either eliminate human control entirely, or let the human control it until they decide not to.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_avoidance_system

The fallout would probably result in a multi-decade setback for (semi-)autonomous cars.

There are very few legitimate reasons for someone to purposely steer off the road at highway speeds, but many reasons for the car to prevent it.

Have you driven on a slippery road? It's much easier to steer than to stop. That is why cars have ABS, for example.

The opposite problem that the autopilot would have to drive the car off the road is equally hard, or even harder: if a concious driver would have made that decision (ditch the car over hitting someone) then so would the autopilot have to, or it would be vastly inferior to a human driver.

That means that the autopilot has to make that judgement and make it very well, since it will involve potentially harming the car and its passengers on purpose. Driving the car into a tree because of misidentifying something that isn't a human for a human would be very bad news.

It's the same deal with wildlife: if a moose is on the road you may have to drive off the road if you can't break, but if it's just a deer you'd likely rather hit it than drive off the road. Autopilot would have to do the same.

A deer will seriously screw up your car and might kill you. Deer do kill more people than sharks in the US. In a lot of areas the ditch is a much safer play.

Obviously if a deer is of a kind that approaches elk/moose size then it's in that category wrt. ditch vs. hit too.

I've only seen one moose on the road. We passed by each other on an icy morning on Hwy 2 west of Lakota, ND. He was just standing on the road on a foggy morning. It did scare the crud out of me.

We've had buffalo. One killed a motorcycle rider and annoyed the buffalo. The other I personally witnessed on a very foggy morning. Seems a very young buffalo escaped the local wildlife reserve. I was standing on the porch of the building where I worked trying to clear my head with a cup of coffee. Out of the fog and down the street ran a small buffalo pursued by a military vehicle. I think they figured they could get it into the back without it hurting them or it[1]. I walked back into the building not having cleared my head.

1) I did learn two things: 1) buffalo do not turn very well going down a hill 2) the door to a Pontiac Firebird does not hold up very well when a small buffalo hits it square after running downhill.