> A human and Autopilot working together is safer than just a human driving

This is not my understanding from colleagues who studied the human factors of what is now called level 2/3 automation many years ago. Partial automation fell into an "uncanny valley" in which the autopilot was good enough most of the time that it lulled most human participants into a false sense of security and caused more (often simulated) accidents than a human driving alone.

Since then I've seen some evidence [1] that with enough experience using an L2 system, operators can increase situational awareness. But overall I wouldn't be surprised if humans with level 2+/3 systems end up causing more fatalities than human operators would alone. That's why I'm relieved to see automakers committing [2] to skipping level 3 entirely.

[1] https://www.iihs.org/api/datastoredocument/bibliography/2220

[2] https://driverless.wonderhowto.com/news/waymo-was-right-why-...

This is absolutely correct. And related to the issue of situational awareness, Tesla Autopilot has utterly failed at the basic design systems concept of "foreseeable misuse."

Having worked in the driver monitoring space, it pains me to see a half-baked, black box system like Autopilot deployed without a driver camera. Steering wheel and seat sensors are not up to the task of making sure the driver is attentive. Don't even get me started on "FSD," which proposes to work in harmony with the human driver in far more complex scenarios.

There's no mixed messaging?

The driver is there just for regulatory purposes, all cars self driving in 2016!, cross country summon in 2017, coast to coast autonomous drive in 2018, Tesla self driving taxis in 2019, FSD making teslas worth 250k$ in 2020! Etc etc

There are a lot of statements by Elon Musk

Those are all "coming soon". Tesla and Elon Musk are 100% clear that today, you still need to be an attentive driver while using Autopilot.

All those years are in the past.

But those were never guaranteed dates, just very poor/optimistic predictions

"I'll sell you this box. I know it is empty today, but I assure you, tomorrow it will contain a lump of gold!"

On the next day: "I'll sell you this box. I know it's empty today, but tomorrow..."

They were, Musk always used that phrase "not a question mark".

> A human and Autopilot working together is safer than just a human driving.

I am not so sure. The data from Tesla is always comparing apples and oranges and I have not seen a good third-party analysis confirming this hypothesis.

The problem is these are not independent. Autopilot can lead to inattentiveness or other things that come from the sense you are now being assisted. So it boils down to a question similar to “is one driver at skill level X better or worse than two co-drivers at skill level Y+Z” where Y is less than or, unlikely, equal to X and Z is currently known to be less than X.