If the self driving system were worth it's salt, it wouldn't matter if the drivers weren't paying attention. Ergo, the system sucks, or is at the very least not nearly as good as Tesla likes to tout.

It can be "worth it's salt" but the government still doesn't see it as such (for many possible reasons).

I don't know if it is or isn't, I never drove one, but those are two completely different standards

Well it's not like there's a self driving car system in operation today that does not require a human in the driver seat at all. Waymo has so much catching up to do.

Doesn't matter, the original point was about Google not being able to build a better self-driving system than Tesla, despite abundance of data, which is true, as far as I'm informed. Whether or not Tesla's self-driving system is "good enough" (for any chosen metric) is beyond the point.

But I guess people these days just love to jump on the opportunity to hate whatever is trendy to hate at the moment.