> Can you expand on how they are an inherent danger, rather than a possible danger?

I do not believe those words (inherent & possible) are in any way mutually exclusive. They might even mean the same thing when describing a latent danger. So I do not quite understand the basis of your challenge. Also, I'm not parent poster.

My understanding of inherent might not be right, then. I think of it as "it is definitely a danger, and thus can only be described as dangerous," which I would argue is not mutually exclusive with possible but is mutually exclusive with "not always dangerous and maybe even anti-dangerous."

So what I mean is, the autopilot could turn out to be safer than manual, in my mind, so how is it "inherently" dangerous.

A swimming pool in your backyard is an inherent danger. That doesn't mean anyone will be injured or killed, but a deep body of water with sheer walls is inherently dangerous.

It would nonetheless also be accurate to describe it as a possible danger, because the danger only manifests in certain circumstances.

> So what I mean is, the autopilot could turn out to be safer than manual, in my mind, so how is it "inherently" dangerous.

That could well be the case but I don't think it eliminates the inherent danger. Maybe it's less dangerous, but cars on the road are just kind of dangerous in general.

I think it's also very generous to assume that the early auto pilot car systems we have today are necessarily safer than human drivers. Emergency braking is almost certainly a net gain. Self driving might be or might not be. A self driving add-on cooked up by geohot? I'm doubtful it's yet gone through the kind of engineering rigor we'd expect of a system like this.

"So what I mean is, the autopilot could turn out to be safer than manual, in my mind, so how is it "inherently" dangerous."

In the same way that the ocean is still inherently dangerous even if you're wearing a life jacket, or how airplanes are still inherently dangerous even though aircraft autopilot systems are effectively mainstream at this point.

It's inherently dangerous because it's a bunch of hardware and software that take over a 2 ton vehicle to turn it into a software guided missile. That's an inherently dangerous set-up that will need a lot of thinking to keep it safe for general use.

Just like a piano suspended from a rope is inherently dangerous. The danger may not manifest at all for that to be the case.

My statement was that "ongoing events that have proven that so-called autopilot systems are inherently a danger to the public at this stage". The important part to note is "at this stage" where at this stage refers to this stage of development and implementation.

Contrary to Tesla's publishing several occasions where Autopilot has possibly saved lives, there have been concrete incidents where people have died while Autopilot is being used. Tesla has backed away from these incidents with the same hand waving that NHTSA has specifically touched on here: that the user is exceeding the system's design purpose.

In this context ("at this stage"), where consumers have historically and will most likely continue to exceed these systems' design purposes and operate them outside of their intended scope, it seems very clear to me that these systems are inherently dangerous to the public. That is, there is no way to make these systems not a danger to the public in their current form.

The NHTSA are fine with auto-braking - indeed, they want it to be standard on all cars in the future[1]. What they're not OK with is companies marketing glorified cruise control as a self-driving feature. Elon Musk likes to lump his implementation of both under the same "Autopilot" umbrella for PR reasons, but you can have the former without the latter - indeed, I'm pretty sure the most prominent example he gave of the former saving a life was wityh the latter switched off.

[1] http://www.autoblog.com/2016/03/17/nhtsa-iihs-20-automakers-...