> Stop the car in the middle of a freeway?

Yes. When the alternative is having a crash they should find a way to stop. [edit: of course I don't mean to suddenly stop. But if the system can't trust the driver is alert it should disengage or stop. As we've seen now multiple times, if it continues it will result in a crash.]

The current behavior is not only dangerous to the driver of a tesla. It puts everyone in the road at risk, most of whom have no contract with tesla and never agreed to be guinea-pigs in their so-called "autonomous" experiment.

Stopping in the middle of the road is dangerous (people will crash into you) and it would also be hard to make something have a feature to pull them off the road. If the computer reads it wrong you'll be in a ditch from the car trying to pull you off the road into something with no shoulder. The shoulder of a road is also dangerous as well even if there is a proper one because people often do not stay exactly in their lane. This is why officers often come around to the passenger side.

Just make the car turn on the warning lights and gently come to a stop when the driver lets go of the steering wheel or is otherwise not paying attention.

There are two possibilities:

1) The driver is actually incapacitated. Then slowing down and stopping is a million times safer than continuing to drive.

2) The driver was looking at his mobile phone. Then he'll probably quickly react and take control of the car again.

I don't see the scenario where continuing to drive is safe when the car knows the driver isn't paying attention.

Big city highway traffic where the road is crowded and moving fast. Those people aren't paying attention either and will slam into you. I've seen cars stopped on the freeway a few times in Atlanta because they broke down and it causes a big wreck. Responders really rush to get them off the road because it's so dangerous.

The biggest issue here is 90% autonomous has been shown to not work. People invariably let down their guard and go "hey, this works" and promptly stop paying attention because there's nothing for them to do.

>People invariably let down their guard and go "hey, this works" and promptly stop paying attention because there's nothing for them to do.

This is not specific to Tesla.

Trivial example: A coworker has a car that has blind spot detection. She knows the manufacturer says "you should still check, it is not 100% accurate". And she admitted that despite knowing this, she does not check her blind spots and relies solely on blind spot detection.

More serious example:

I have a car that has adaptive cruise control. You can get on the highway, set the CC to 60 mph, but if traffic slows down, it automatically slows down and maintains a distance to the next car. It speeds up to 60 mph when the traffic picks up again.

I love it, but for the inexperienced driver, this is dangerous. It requires one to be more vigilant than regular CC. Every so often (rare, but has happened a few times), it will not detect that the vehicle in front of me is a vehicle, and will not slow down. The more you rely on it, the more vigilant you need to be. My wife has never used CC before, and this would be too much for her to handle, compared to simpler CC.

It's a general problem. Tesla is just a convenient target.

I very much agree with your opinion. Systems which take over most but not all responsibility seem to lull us humans into a false sense of security/reliability. The psychological aspect of this is actually quite intriguing, but it's also a very dangerous phenomena.

I don't know anything about your wife, but that does sound perhaps a touch condescending. Besides that I think you make a very good point, one that many people seem to want to wish away.

>I don't know anything about your wife, but that does sound perhaps a touch condescending.

That's probably because you don't know anything about my wife :-)

This isn't about my wife. I would never recommend anyone to learn CC on this type of system. They should learn CC on a regular car, and once they're comfortable with that, switch to something like this. You simply have to be more alert for a "safe" CC than a regular one.

> alarms when you take your hands off the wheel.

No, only every ~ 1 minute.

>What the hell are they going to do if you take your hands off the wheel

Detect barrier and apply auto emergency brakes and Disengage autopilot like GM's Super Cruise does if it detects your face is not looking at the road.