I'm not saying Tesla is lying. But I am saying that I could spend six figures on a car from a company that is ready and waiting to stab me in the back. Or, I could spend five figures on a Toyota, knowing that Toyota is not going to sell me out if my car crashes.

I mean, look, it makes sense Tesla has to defend itself, especially legally, but there's a big difference between pulling out the logs when you need to for the lawyers and the regulators... and making a public blog post blaming the customer.

I think you're absolutely correct, and moreover that the difference comes from that it's in Toyota's best interest to think about the long term, play good guy and dip into their rainy day money for any costs associated with that.

Whereas with Tesla, they're leveraged out to here with stock valuation based on promises and projections, and if their key tech is perceived as seriously flawed, they're not going to exist as a company in the long term.

As far as I can tell, Toyota (or other car manufacturers) would be just as inclined to argue driver error in crashes (especially once involved in litigation). See e.g. https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman14_toyota_ua_... for a discussion of some Toyota crashes.

I think there's a significant difference between a company who will defend itself reasonably in court, and one which is actively collecting telemetry on your car, and will proactively write a blog about how badly you drove.

There is a nuance here though: unlike a "classic" car, tesla and other modern cars clearly have access to a wealth of data about your driving and your crash. The scope of lying by omission, of even simply misinterpreting the wealth of data is much larger.

I do think it's reasonable to ask of them to either keep completely silent; or to be completely open - perhaps by giving complete access to all data to a truly independent third party, and not picking which facts they think are fit for public consumption, and which are not.

I admire what Tesla has achieved - but this is a company under considerable pressure. They may well go bankrupt; and every incident matters. They are under terrible pressure to massage those facts to make them look good. I can't help but treat any statement like this no differently to any other ad - it's easily possible to be misleading even when there is some possible interpretation that isn't an intentional untruth.

Everybody knows people aren't good at sitting around doing nothing and maintaining focus. Distracted driving isn't a new risk. So the question is: are the safety benefits to a driver aid really greater than the risk they cause by encouraging distraction? Even if the driver aid catches 99% of all risks, that may yet be a net negative. Personally, I don't think it's reasonable for a system that encourages distracted driving to then claim it was the driver's fault they were distracted. No amount of small print or big fat warnings can ever excuse ignoring reality. If the autopilot is contributing to driver inattention, then the driver's inattention is no longer just the driver's fault. Not that I'm at all sure that's what's happening here, but there are some ominous indications, that is for sure. Without an autopilot, who takes their hands off the wheel for more than 6 seconds on a drive like that?