Tesla no longer sells cars with automatic driving capability. The hardware is there on newly shipping cars (although the sensor suite is weak) but it's not active. There's a lawsuit.[1]

It's unlikely that Tesla gets much useful data from vehicles. To debug a vision system, they'd need the camera data from all the cameras, and that's too big to upload over the cell phone data link.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/brookecrothers/2017/04/23/tesla...

They don't need all the vision data -- likely what they're doing is running their beta self-driving features in the background all the time, and only send data back (1) when the driver's input differs dramatically from what the self-driver would have done itself, presumably because the driver saw something their software missed, and/or (2) when a driver gets in a crash (at which point they can check if their algorithm would have prevented the accident).

They just need to send back data from a few seconds before either of those scenarios to quickly accumulate a giant library of one-in-a-million edge cases they can test future algorithm tweaks against. I think it's a reasonable strategy.

This is a gross misrepresentation of what's happening with AP2. AP2 is not up to feature parity with AP1, but it's not true that "it's not active".

This article summarizes the latest AP2 software release: https://electrek.co/2017/03/30/tesla-autopilot-2-0-camera-8-...

I couldn't find a reference to this:"Tesla no longer sells cars with automatic driving capability." Can you point to one?

Search Google for "Tesla disables autopilot".

Thanks. I found that when they transitioned to Hardware2/AP2 they cut out most autopilot functionality, and since then have been gradually releasing updates that bring back that functionality.

If you believe that self driving cars will make roads much safer you should be for lots of testing and a measured approach. It only takes a few more high profile accidents before society turns against them.

Self driving cars also offer the chance to dramatically increase that figure. They have failure modes that do not exist with human drivers. Cautious is good.