This is a blatant excuse - you can gently hold the wheels ready to take over without applying pressure and their system will not detect it you don't firmly hold the wheels, which defeats the comfort of having bought "Autopilot" in the first place.

This feels particularly evasive. If you want to claim that your technology is 10x safer, you should be able to back that up with self-insurance, and not try to put the blame on the driver.

If the autopilot does not think it is capable of driving safely, it should pull over to the shoulder of the road, not beep and flash.

Speaking of insurance, but not self-insurance:

I'm guessing that if I buy a Tesla with autopilot, I'm not going to find any insurers who will charge me discounted rates that reflect autopilot being 10x safer.

It doesn't seem like pulling to the right would be safe in this situation. I think that automatically slowing down would be, though. Even slowing at a rate similar to a human letting their foot off the gas (to avoid unexpected behavior) would reduce the chance of fatality in a crash.

People pull over to the shoulder safely everyday. If an autopilot car cannot do this, it should not be on the road.

People do not pull over to the shoulder when they are between lanes in (presumably) busy traffic, which is where you have to be to hit a median.

I am not sure if Tesla's current system, which is still just cruise control with steering, should ever be changing lanes unprompted. I don't have a Tesla but I would not want my car's cruise control to do that right now. I do think that pulling over in safe conditions is something that a self-driving system needs to be able to do at some point on the path to full autonomy.

In this situation I think the lane to the right is not the shoulder. So in a situation where there are only seconds to respond to an obstacle, there might be cars blocking the Tesla on the right.

No one shipping a Level 2 system provides insurance for it. The definition of Level 2 is that the driver has responsibility.

That's very troubling. If you saw the Uber crash cam on the driver it's obvious that the "responsible drivers" are completely non-responsive, on their phones, half asleep. A system that lulls the driver into a false sense of security does NOT pass responsibility to said driver.

Uber is testing a Level 4-5 system, those systems will need to be insured since they will not have a driver in the car.

Actually the warning had nothing to do with the crash. if i drove on AP for 15 minutes and i was alerted to put my hands on the wheel 2 minutes in. It would fit tesla's specially crafted statement.

making it look like user was warned and didn't respond by putting their hands on the wheel but like i previously said, its completely false.

Letting auto pilot get to a point where it does the audible warning means the driver wasn’t paying attention.