Tesla has been given an incredibly long rope by regulators and it'll just take a really terrible accident or two to bring it all to a screeching halt.
It's hard to imagine Elon not realizing this, but the incessant drive to the endgame may cloud his judgement.
There have been four deaths while Autopilot was engaged [1], almost all because the drivers weren’t paying attention. Autopilot has been used for 3 billion miles, 1 billion with Navigate on Autopilot (automatic passing and interchange routing), and 200,000 automated lane changes [2]. Is this not impressive?
Yes, self driving is hard. Yes, there will be fatalities due to edge cases. It is unreasonable to confine the tech to a test track until it’s perfect, considering the human incurred death rate as it stands. We should be racing to take the person out of the driver’s seat.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_self-driving_car_fatal...
[2] https://electrek.co/2020/04/22/tesla-autopilot-data-3-billio...
Further to that, human deaths will be skewed towards drunk drivers and other “bad” drivers. Autopilot deaths will be “random”, so public perception will be worse even if the figures were exactly the same.
The other problem is complacency - the Apple software engineer had 2 seconds from his Tesla leaving the road to it hitting the gore point - and this was a bug he was aware of. If the car looks like it’s 100% infallible then peoples attention will naturally waver. How long does it take to react to a situation? Feel the weight of the steering again? Calculate the appropriate correction?
I think the system that replaces human drivers has to be 100 times better in terms of fatalities in order to be accepted by society.
The cold-hard-reality is that if a self-driving car of any make were to careen into a school-bus full of children and burst into flames all automakers would very likely face severe restrictions going forward.
Same goes for self-driving cars. Critical mass has not been reached, not by a long shot. Most miles driven by autopilot cars have been supervised by either trained or very attentive drivers or even in very controlled environments. In other words, not how autopilot will be used in the real world what so ever. Because that's not the point. Either the car drives by itself or the person is driving. Not half here, half there. This is where the fear and hesitation exists. Will autopilot be inevitable? Probably. But Silicon Valley's cult like attitude to "break things fast" is not the attitude I want behind the software that is going to drive me to work or make me headless like the dude that crashed into a semitruck in Florida. At 33, I'm perfectly good at driving and will place my own life in my hands if "break things fast" is going to be their little bonfire chant. Someone else's idea of "the greater good" doesn't always live up to expectations.
If the public thinks this is how self-driving car work, I think self-driving will have a very hard time becoming popular and avoiding extreme regulation.
Still, we should expect autonomous vehicles to cope with that, which is certainly not the case yet.