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Tesla Model S Plows Into a Fire Truck While Using Autopilot (cnbc.com)
On Monday, a Tesla Model S plowed into the back of a fire truck on a freeway near Culver City, California. The driver is claiming the car was on Tesla's Autopilot driver assistance system. As a result, the National Traffic Safety Board will be investigating both driver and vehicle factors. CNBC reports: The Culver City Firefighters Association Local 1927 union chapter tweeted out a picture of the crash on Monday afternoon. The firetruck was on the freeway helping after a motorcycle accident, the union said in an Instagram post. The post said there were no injuries. The outcome could have been much worse if firefighters had been standing at the back of the truck, Battalion Chief Ken Powell told the San Jose Mercury News. "Autopilot is intended for use only with a fully attentive driver," Tesla said in a statement sent to CNBC.
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/01/22/2311225/tesla-owner-attempts-autopilot-defense-during-dui-stop
so as not to look as stupid as he/she is
Now the idiot driver wrecked their Tesla and they have to pay for damages to the fire truck
I don't own a Tesla, but I know my own car's auto brake system doesn't gracefully slow to a stop unless the speed difference between my car and whatever is in front of me is less than 30 MPH.
If the delta-v is more than 30 MPH, my car will do a "panic stop" thing to slow the car down, but it'll be too late to avoid a collision.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
If it was like the idiot in kansas or oklahoma more likely the driver was driving and texting or doing something else you're not supposed to do while driving
I'm kind of wondering what the purpose of autopilot is since it's only to be used by a fully attentive driver. What benefit does it add?
And if no benefit, why is it in the car in the first place, since it obviously acts as a lure for those who aren't fully attentive?
Because it isn't actually what most people would consider an autopilot and doesn't handle all situations. The truck was stopped and the car was driving at highway speed, and Tesla is probably not handling coming up on a fully stopped vehicle at that speed.
Hey Tesla, how about you STOP calling it autopilot. It's NOT autopilot. You don't get into the car and say "Ok Tesla, let's go to the pharmacy" and then sit back and enjoy the ride while the car drives you there.
Call it "Driver Assist" as in the driver is watching what's going on around them like they should and let the car keep itself within the lane and not bump into other cars while driving.
You set a high expectation with drivers when you keep calling it "Autopilot". Stop it.
This is the sort of thing we're all going to see as 'self driving cars' start being used by average people on public roads on a day-to-day basis.
NOTE: I fully understand that Tesla's 'autopilot' feature isn't a full-on self-driving car. But I'm using it as an example; read on:
People see movies and watch TV shows that have 'fantasy' AI in them (fully sentient, talks to you, equivalent to or better than a human mind, etc) and they think that's what's in their so-called self-driving car. This of course couldn't be farther from the truth. They'll proceed to trust the technology way, way too much, thinking it's got some sort of godlike awareness and intelligence, and there will be death and destruction because of it. Even if you tell most people in no uncertain terms that it's not a real, thinking mind in there, they're not likely to understand.
Since we few who see the flaws and massive deficiencies in this technology are vastly outnumbered by all the fanboys, we'll have no chance to stop this before it proliferates. Cross your fingers, I guess, that a runaway SDC doesn't mow you down on the street because it screwed up. The first decade of so-called 'self driving cars' on public roads every day is going to be bloody and horrifying, mark my words.
I've noticed this with auto-pilot. It's good at following cars that are moving but if I'm driving down a road and there's a car stopped in front of me (for instance, at a red light), it seems to full speed way past the point where I'd start slowing down when driving manually.
I've not let it do its thing yet, instead I'll take over.
It seems they've calibrated it to function like most adaptive cruise controls in that it's great at matching the speed of a car it's already tracking in front of you. But it isn't calibrated for non highway driving in that it'll stop for parked cars...
Car companies are going to continue to push their phony autopilot technology as long as they can, because they can always claim it was driver error whenever there is an accident. But eventually statistics will catch up with them, eventually there will be 100 Tesla-related accidents, and some percentage of them will be determined to be the fault of the technology. And then we will have statistical evidence, the number of accidents per million miles, to decide if any of this stuff is worth the expense.
If no defects were found in the autopilot system, then why did the car crash?
Ignoring the fact that drivers are supposed to be paying attention while autopilot is engaged, I can see no reason that if the driver is telling the truth, that the car would not have slowed to a stop instead of hitting the truck at full speed.
I think it is more likely that the person is either lying (or mistaken) about autopilot being engaged or they were doing something else to override the autopilot's normal function.
The Tesla owner's manual says that Traffic-Aware Cruise Control, which is part of the Autopilot system, "cannot detect all objects and may not brake/decelerate for stationary vehicles"
IT ISN'T allowed on the road, The driver must be attentive and in control at all times, the fact that it was left to the autopilot to make the decision was a driver failure and I say this as someone that doesn't like Tesla!
If no defects were found in the autopilot system, then why did the car crash?
The "no defects were found" is from the fatal crash a couple of years ago, and there were several contributing factors, outside of the autopilot.
That said: I don't drive a Tesla, but my car has a similar adaptive cruise control and auto-braking system. On my (non-tesla), I can easily see how somebody not familiar with it would think "Oh, I have the system engaged, the car will stop."
The reality is that it'll only stop if the difference in speed between my car and the object in front of me is less than 30 MPH. Drivers must go to the effort of learning the car's systems in order to know that. (And the learning comes from the Manufacturer's YouTube videos, The Fine Manual, The Dealership's guy whose only job is to teach customers about it, and said it at least a dozen times...)
I've been in more than a few situations where I can see traffic is stopped ahead, but my car continues accelerating towards them -- I'm accelerating past 50 MPH, while they're at a dead stop, 50 meters ahead.
Honestly, it feels like my brain is breaking every time: "Why isn't the car slowing down? Oh yeah, dummy! I gotta do it this time!"
So with my experience in a similar system on an entirely different make/model, I'm willing to bet the guy could have had autopilot engaged, but he didn't learn (for whatever reason) its limitations.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
All Tesla’s should be banded from the road. They are defective by design.
... go home.
Every collision avoidance system in vehicles today that I know of knows to apply the brakes when an obstacle is detected in front of the car. The car would be plainly able to detect the vehicle at a distance that is still far enough away that it would have been more than capable of safely slowing down.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Ah.... well that's a major pitfall right there. If it can't brake or detect for stationary vehicles, will it also fail to brake or detect someone, perhaps a child, who runs out in front of traffic?
I was under the impression that all modern collision avoidance systems are more than capable of handling this... if Tesla's cannot even manage this detail then their so-called autopilot is, to put it bluntly, a piece of shit.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The tweet is on what appears to be an official twitter account. But, it claims the vehicle was traveling at 65 mph when it struck???
Firemen with any experience at all have usually worked a few highway crashes. Anyone with a clue as to what striking a near immovable object (as demonstrated by the mostly superficial damage to the truck) at 65 mph does to a modern vehicle with all sorts of built-in crumple zones can tell at a glance that this collision occurred at a far slower speed than 65 mph. I'd be surprised if it was even 40mph. It does not even appear that any of the Tesla's glass cracked. And the damage to the truck appears to be at a surface level. I wonder if the airbags deployed?
As public officials, these folks need to be much more responsible in what they tweet. Hopefully, responsible officials will correct the record and at least chastise whoever posted the tweet after reviewing the crash data.
If no defects were found in the autopilot system, then why did the car crash?
If Volkswagen can cheat at environmental tests for about 8-10 years, then I'm not confident that complex autopilot systems are throughly examined. As far as I know they aren't even using formal verification to prove the correctness of the autopilot software or even its subsystems.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
While using Tesla Autopilot the driver is to be ready with hands over the wheel and ready and aware of the complete environment around them.
;) Heck if that is the case you may as well be driving yourself ;)
;)
In order to take instantaneous control if needed
Just my 2 cents
So best case, no one shoud trust Autopilot. There simply isn't enough time to take over between when you trust it and when you realize you can't.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
One, the other big notable accident was also with a vehicle with high ground clearance. At the time it was suggested that the system sensors were basically counting on something relatively close to the ground, and would miss things as they approach 'decaptiation level'.
I will say I am highly skeptical that the car slammed in at full 65 mph into a stopped fire truck. I got rear ended while I was going about 15 mph (traffic jam) by a car that was going about 60, and there were injuries and both cars were in much worse shape than the Tesla pictured (both cars totaled, frames bent so bad that no doors able to open without prybars), and that's with both cars having crumple zones, whereas the fire truck didn't yield much at all and the Tesla had to take the vast majority of the energy of the impact. Also, the Model S is a pretty heavy car, so there had to be a lot of energy in that collision.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
That is a strikingly severe limitation... one that I had not heard about this previously. is this actually deliberate, because I cannot fathom how it would only be the best we can do technologically.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The problem is by the time you realize the autopilot isn't going to stop in time its too late for you to stop as well.
^to be fair, it says its only a problem at higher speeds.
OK so you have a large red stopped vehicle, and the tesla's sensor location system failed so badly as not to detect it!
;) So was there a reddish sky ;)
;)
Pretty bad oops, in their self driving code! And their product in general!
Let me see what was the first Tesla death, the Tesla mistook the White side of a semi trailer for the sky?
Just my 2 cents
Ah.... so it's untrustworthy when it's also the most likely to be deadly.
Good to know.
I thought stuff like this was supposed to *save* lives...?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You are right about what fully attentive means, but there's no reason for Tesla nor anyone else to think that that is the behaviour they're encouraging.
1) this "autopilot" idea makes it harder to pay attention because you aren't actually doing anything interactive, and
2) it's just not that easy to suddenly take control of something in a split second when you aren't already in the mindset of controlling the vehicle.
I prefer what some other manufacturers are doing: have the driving assistance leap into action when the driver's inattention has already got themselves into shit.
It should be: A person driving a Tesla plows into a fire truck. The person, not the car. The car was not at fault, it just happened to sustain the damage.
Autopilot is intended for use only with a fully attentive driver
Then why the hell are they calling it Autopilot?
Go on, citizen, stamp the vote card. R or D, your choice.
I would have thought they would have worked all the bugs out of Autopilot by now. After all they've been working on it for 40+ years as seen in this documentary clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Except all/most auto braking implementations guarantee stopping before impact ONLY if the velocity difference is small enough. Tesla or any other system cannot make a full stop from highway speeds in time.
Tesla
>Sells car with "auto pilot" mode, advertises as self-driving feature with claims of how advanced it is and how much stress it can relieve from the average highway drive.
Tesla Shill
>Never, not once, has Tesla even insinuated that one could relinquish all control when autopilot is activated.
I would think that at highways speeds, it would slow down sooner, basically as when a stationary (or nearly stationary) obstacle is detected directly ahead, and the speed at which the vehicle is going still leaves a safe stopping distance.
If you are a safe following distance behind a car and it suddenly stops, why on earth would it not be able to detect that? If a moose or bear happens to be crossing the road, are you saying it would not see it and try to slow down as quickly as possible? It's obvious that a human driver should also be doing so, but it makes absolutely no sense that at the speeds where a collision is the most likely to be deadly, the so-called collision avoidance system is actually most likely to be unreliable, and thus no more likely to save lives than if it had not been there at all (possibly even less likely, given the nature of human psychology).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
My Outback with EyeSight will do its damnest to brake in that situation because the engineers understand that slower is better than doing nothing. I've tested up to about 45mph with cardboard boxes. Very strange felling. Amazing what they can do with two cameras, even in PNW rain.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Well, if you can work out how a computer vision system can easily tell the difference between a car in a different lane on a bending road, versus a car stopped in the lane in front of you, you're a better developer than I.
Google's best can't tell the difference between primates and humans with a similar skin color, so I do not feel too bad.
I'm willing to bet they have the limitation to avoid unnecessary slamming on the brakes for no reason.
(My car has a much simpler system, and doesn't claim otherwise. It's an alternative to nothing.)
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
I don't think it can be realistically expected that drivers running autopilot will immediately react to poor choices being made by the car. Continuously monitoring an automated system that works well almost all the time is massively boring. There's just no way that anyone but the most OCD is going to continuesly maintain the level attention that they would deliver if they were actually driving.
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Drivers must go to the effort of learning the car's systems in order to know that..
Yikes - maybe we need a new class of license for people to drive a car with advanced but not fully autonomous features like these.
I always cringe when I see drivers not looking at the road for too long. This often happens in movies, but all too often it happens in real life as well. If I have to watch the road all adaptive cruise and auto-braking would do for me is give my foot a rest. That's where conventional cruise control is great (giving my foot a rest) on long trips but I still have to pay attention to the road.
Such advanced features should be considered more of a backup rather than a primary safety device.
That is until we can truly have a car that we can trust to fall asleep in and never have to be expected to take over control at a moment's notice.
If you do happen to fall asleep at the wheel maybe it will save you, but don't count on it.
The locomotive engineers!
All they have to do is to watch the speed, grade and signals.
And the number one problem for them? Boredom. They fall asleep. The nod off. There have been adding more and more devices to check the alertness of the drivers. Deadman's treadle is what? hundred years old? Now with computers they are thinking of creating a challenge and response to avoid them responding mechanically.
If the autopilot is going to steer and the documentation says, "driver must be fully attentive", it is time they add deadman's treadle and a host of devices to make sure there is a fully attentive driver there.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I know exactly what you mean. But I think that is more to do with the specs of how far the EyeSight can reliably discern an object and providing false positives. But hey, at least it stops!
The only false positive I've had going forward is a slight braking (and beeping) when a plastic shopping bag flew in front of the windshield, but that was just for a moment. Better that than mistake a kid.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
I was wondering if at lower speeds Tesla Autopilot is able to make better decisions...
Forget what Tesla does. Think of used car salesmen.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Go look up how a plane autopilot works.
The excuse in this case is: "auto pilot didnt save me."
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
If the autopilot had frequent problems, drivers would stay alert, but if it works very reliably, most people will have difficulty keeping their attention focused.
For aircraft autopilots, most failures allow a lot of correction time - despite the speeds, things happen relatively slowly in most aircraft and there is time for the pilot to give his attention to the problem. With cars an accident can happen very quickly, before the inattentive driver can shift his attention.
The guy walked away from the crash, so the car did its job. I guess they isolate the following and stopping logic because there are too many motionless things that cannot be logically tracked or anticipated until you are on an otherwise irreversible collision course with them.
Room for improvement to say the least; something blocking the traffic lane should be considered prior to impact.
If the road is bending, then you'd need to be moving slower anyways... It can't be that hard to ensure that if there is something in front of the vehicle, the car never be moving faster than it could safely stop in the distance to it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Ah.... damn that stupid fire truck, jumping out in front the Tesla like that with no warning.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I think I'd be frightened too.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Apples and oranges. They don't give out pilots' licenses on cereal boxes in most jurisdictions.
Having visited Italy and California I can safely conclude that getting a driver's license is a lot less stringent.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The fact that the airbags didn't fire would suggest that if autopilot was engaged, it did a great job slowing the vehicle. It's not magic. It can't bring the vehicle to a dead stop the moment it detects an obstacle.
True, but one is in the same lane as you... the other isn't. At highway speeds, usually the lanes are fairly clearly marked. A computer vision based system should be able to extrapolate information about the lanes in the road ahead to tell what cars are within a stopping distance and are on the shoulder vs which may be stopped and blocking the road. In the city, or especially suburban roads where the road lanes may not be so clearly marked, one is also driving at considerably lower speeds, the stopping distance is shorter, and so the angle between cars you would pass vs cars in the same driving lane as you at the necessary stopping distance is correspondingly larger.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Dude, you're talking about laws of physics here. A car going 65 MPH is physically incapable of coming to a complete and abrupt stop in a way that does NOT kill the driver of said car.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Exactly. Not interested in anything much beyond cruise control unless I can get in the back seat and snooze while it drives me all night to where I want to go. This would, of course, drive the cops nuts 'cuz there would be nobody to blame if something didn't go quite perfectly.
When we get the positronic brain that enables "Mr. Data"-level intelligence, only then should we be trusting a machine to autonomously navigate the open highways. Otherwise, build transportation on rails, use simple devices to keep vehicles from contacting each other, and still go to sleep in the back seat and still obsolete the traffic cops.
Autopilot has done well but there's always room for improvement. Next time, it should aim to include an ambulance in the mix - the human occupants matter too!
Requiem for the American Dream
The kind of idiot that does this...
is this actually deliberate, because I cannot fathom how it would only be the best we can do technologically.
Maybe because they have somehow difficulties telling the difference between a car stopped in the middle of the road, or a car parked at the side of the street? Well, lane detection should help them out there, or is there maybe a distance limitation about how far ahead the car can follow its lane?
Say no to software patents.
Only if they are so close to the obstruction that a collision cannot be avoided. The safe stopping distance required at that speed is actually less than 300 feet, with about 30% of that being taken up by time required for human reaction time, which should be neglible for a computer controlled system, so the actual stopping distance by a computer can be correspondingly less. And given that the stopping distance at a given speed is almost exactly the same as the minumum recommended following distance, any car with something called an autopilot feature should be able to detect things at that distance (otherwise what the fuck is adaptive cruise control even doing that a basic cruise control that just presets the car's speed doesn't do?)
So why couldn't a sensor on a car modern with a collision avoidance system be able to clearly see that a truck is blocking its path long before it gets too close that it is unable to stop in time?
Or are you saying that he deliberately shifted into a lane that, being less than 300 feet away, *HE* could have plainly seen was blocked as well?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
What was the driver doing at the time of the crash that they blatantly ignored a fire truck in their lane?
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
No, you shouldn't trust autopilot. Hell, you shouldn't trust *the car.* You should know what to do if your brakes fail. You should know what to do if you develop a steering problem. You should know what to do if a tire blows out. And so on.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Here's the thing though.... the minimum safe stopping distance at any given speed is roughly the same minimum distance you are ordinarily supposed to keep between you and the car in front of you when travelling at cruising speed, so the cars sensors should be more than able to ordinarily detect something in one's own lane that is not moving at the same speed as the car itself, and the greater the speed difference, the faster it can be detected.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
If an airplane on autopilot flies into the side of a mountain, it's the pilot's fault. No difference in this case.
Maybe it's just lurchy lane changers. But when I'm passing a lane full of stopped/slow cars I like to be going no more than 20-30 mph faster than them.
For vehicles on the shoulder, I was trained to _not_ buzz right by them at full speed. Move over or slow down. Doubly so when emergency lights are flashing.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
We should also have tougher license standards for people who want to drive cars with slush boxes. 99% of _terrible_ drivers can't drive stick.
Make everybody take their driving test in a stick shift.
And required 'yellow bumpers' until they drive for a year without accident or ticket.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I for one, won't be giving up my car with physical connections between both brake pedal and master cylinder, steering wheel and rack and gas pedal and throttle body. Not until car software is developed to FAA standards. Even then, maybe.
I'm amazed at the number of /.ers that are buying into vapor being an inevitable success.
Consider how your reaction would be different if MS was making the software...that's the correct reaction.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I for one, won't be giving up my car with physical connections between both brake pedal and master cylinder, steering wheel and rack and gas pedal and throttle body.
Then 10-15 years from now you might not be able to drive in certain city centers. I predict some cities, perhaps London, will require autonomous cars on certain days to reduce traffic congestion downtown. These corporations can manipulate city governments quite easily with incentive programs or just outright bribes.
I'm amazed at the number of /.ers that are buying into vapor being an inevitable success.
Oh it's inevitable. I think a lot of people are going to make a ton of money. And a lot of consumers are going to be buying expensive autonomous cars to replace their old fashioned one. Even if the reality is that the autonomous cars don't live up to their promises. We'll see government agencies looking the other way in traffic fatalities from this new technology, especially from the driver assist (level 1) to high automation (level 4?) because the human driver will be the one taking responsibility even in cases where the software is faulty. This is because once a standards organization rubber stamps the autopilot software after passing a few irrelevant tests, the company is nearly off the hook on liability. For full automation (level 5), we'll see government organizations stepping in to protect car manufactures on the excuse that important new technology needs help to mature.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Where can I get a cereal box driver's license? Which states accept them?
Even in aviation, the pilot is responsible for safety, not the autopilot. What's really going on is a widespread misunderstanding of the capabilities of autopilots in both aviation and ground vehicles.
Organization? You must be joking..
Alll bets are off during rush hour in a city thatâ(TM)s consistently in the top three contenders in the race for the worst drivers in the US.
Iâ(TM)ve lost count of the number of times somebody uses the âcurteouslyâ(TM)-unoccupied lane as a âoefast laneâ, zooming past everybody else well above the speed limit. Then they make an emergency lane change when they run out of room...
I've simply come to accept that even driving defensively, eliminating distraction, and keeping my eyes glued to the road, I may react to crazy shit #1 and totally miss crazy shit #2.
Thatâ(TM)s where I see a real benefit from an autonomous system that reacts faster than I can...
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
I predict you're wrong. Again, reconsider this steaming pile of vapor in light of it having come from MS.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
So what's the point of having a car that can brake for you if you have to do it manually all the time anyway? Because if you let it do 'it's thing' it might be too late to take over and you'll be blamed for the accident?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
If a computer can't tell what was within a minimum safe stopping distance then neither could a human, and a defensive driver would adjust their speed to compensate for lack of visibility.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I don't trust the safety features on my car. I'm fine with adaptive cruise control, because I've always got a couple of seconds warning of impending collision. I keep the vehicle more or less in the lane by myself, and I brake myself rather than letting the car do it. On the other hand, if I screw up, the car may do the right thing anyway, so that's good.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Add to the list of things that distract drivers: hard-to-read electronic signs warning against distracted driving. I found that one ironic.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Well, what's the point of cruise control? Blind spot assist? ABS brakes? Power steering? All that stuff is there to help the driver, not supplant the driver.
At some point, we'll tip over from 'full suite of driver assist features' to 'Siri, drive me to work.' But we're not there yet.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
None of those things are expected to replace you. Autopilot is advertised as replacing you as a driver at least some of the time. Except apparently it sometimes doesn't. If we aren't to the point of full autonomous yet, then Tesla should have done what all the other vehicle manufacturers are doing; get something that is at that point before releasing it. Tesla drivers are nothing but human guinea pigs. I guess they signed up for that but it seems bizarre to me that anyone would.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I remember when people used to tell me that PDAs and Palm Pilots and electronic organizers wouldn't catch on. And I probably looked stupid carrying one around back in the day. But smart phones aren't really all that different from PDAs in terms of use. Maybe I had to HotSync once a day instead of being connected to "the cloud".
Adoption of technology that is convenient is inevitable. I totally understand if you think self driving cars are some kind of fad. But if you think that people aren't willing to give up control or sacrifice safety in favor of convenience, then you haven't been paying attention for the entire 20th and 21st centuries.
MS's software quality is not really relevant. For starters people put that crap operating system in ATMs now. Nobody but you fucking cares anymore. Convenience over safety, reliability, security, etc. If we had 10 self driving cars a week driving into brick walls it would be data that is lost in the noise of the 750 traffic fatalities a week we have with human drivers today in the US. And I don't think most consumers are going to care enough not to move forward with buying one of these vehicles. They might care enough to write their congressperson and demand better regulation, but we know that the legislature is only going to go through the motions long enough to get their constituency of their back.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
It does try to stop as soon as obstacle is detected. The detection distance is most likely less than the stopping distance. In any case in sudden cases braking happens faster with brake assist than without one, so end result is better. Anticipation and seeing past the detection distance is left to the driver.
One comparison: https://youtu.be/UK7JqCR7w-g
you just don't seem to get it. autopilot SHOULD NOT be making that decision. You are supposed to make that decision, if you somehow forget to make that decision or got distracted for a moment then Auto Pilot is meant as a backup that might prevent the accident, it is not meant as a replacement for your driving.
autopilot is not advertised as replacing you as the driver, in fact it is explicitly forbidden to use autopilot in such a manner, at this point in time it is purely a driver assist not a driver replace.
You're missing the point. The point is that humans are unable take over properly in all the scenarios that this type of technology creates. Using it means that they must trust it, but trusting it will get you into an accident. It doesn't really matter what Tesla advertises it as, the fact that they create it and endorse it is enough.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.