> “The crash driver’s employer, Apple, is a tech leader, but like most employers, has yet to develop a distracted driving policy,” Sumwalt said.

Are employers really supposed to police what their employees do when they aren't working?

I would say "no", but there's one area it could apply: to make sure an employer will never require an employee to be on the phone while driving (even on speakerphone).

This is why when in a big enterprise, you’ll find a bunch of these completely unrelated sections appended to the employee handbook.

So that when shit like this happens, you can legitimately say “We ask employees to not play games while driving.”

It’s utterly pointless, but makes the company and the regulator feel good?

It helps with their insurance as well, especially if someone is driving on company business.

Absolutely not. That recommendation makes no sense.

> “If you own a car with partial automation, you do not own a self-driving car,” Sumwalt said. “Don’t pretend that you do. This means that when driving in the supposed ‘self-driving’ mode: you can’t sleep; you can’t read a book; you can’t watch a movie or TV show; you can’t text; and, you can’t play video games. And, that is precisely what we found in this crash – the driver was playing a video game on his smartphone when his car veered into the median barrier.”

It is too early to put this kind of faith in tech where matter is of life and death. Not only yours but others as well.

> "Mr. Huang was using Autopilot where Tesla told its customers it was safe to use. The Autopilot in Mr. Huang’s Tesla failed to perform according to its claimed capabilities. Instead of keeping Mr. Huang’s Model X in a safe lane of travel, Tesla’s Autopilot system moved his car out of its lane and into the gore point off the roadway. Then, rather than brake the car, the Autopilot accelerated Mr. Huang’s Model X and caused it to crash at high speed into a fixed highway barrier.”

What type of modals they are using for training ? Looks like serious data issue.

You know, even my fitness game makes more of a fuss if I don’t have the right grip, and there I am not barreling down a highway in a deadly machine.

Would it be so bad to have a loud buzzer in cars that refuses to turn off until you have a complete (multi-finger) grip on both ends of the steering wheel?

My Mazda CX-9 has this sort of check (to require at least one hand on the wheel) but it’s incredibly annoying due to false positives. Every once in a while I am only touching the wheel lightly and it freaks out with alarms. It’s just my personal experience but I think it is more dangerous to have a bunch of erroneous, distracting alarms than it is to try to police everything.

Tesla owners are paying to be beta testers ... imagine if a company like Toyota released and marketed such a "feature" and somebody died because it ???.

How do they know this? Who has the information? How did it get to the NTSB?