Edit: I see the downvote. Am I wrong? Is being a CEO all rainbows and sunshine? Maybe I got some detail wrong. Feel free to correct me.
I like it when people try to do hard stuff, that's fine and maybe heroic. But they have to be prepared : if testing the whole thing must take 10 years to be safe and a gazillion dollars, then so be it. If it's too much to shoulder, then they should not enter the business.
That sounds like a succinct explanation for why we've been stuck in LEO since December 19, 1972.
We've got 7 billion+ humans on the surface of our planet. We lose about 1.8/s to various tragedies.
Most of which are of less import than helping automate something that's responsible for around 32,000 deaths in the US every year. Move fast, break people for a just cause, escape risk-averse sociotechnological local minima, and build a future where fewer people die.
Tesla is also not doing any kind of super special research into self driving cars. The system their cars use is (afaik) an OEM component (provided by MobileEye) that powers the driver assist features of many other brands, too.
Instead of actually improving the technology they have chosen to lower the safety parameters in order to make it seem like the system is more capable than it actually is.
We shouldn't go off expecting that someone elses ideas of safety will jive 100% with our own, and then blame them when someone else buys a product and is injured.
Should Telsa drive-assist deactivate and slow the car after 10 seconds without touching the wheel? Probably, but I won't blame them for not doing so if there is no regulatory framework to help them make a decision. It's certainly not obvious that 10 seconds is the limit and not 11, or 15 or 2 seconds.
Tesla tells us "it's the driver's fault that he died while using our Autopilot".
Either Musk approved this message, or he didn't bother to read it before it went out, and didn't bother to apologize afterwards.
I think we can draw some conclusions from that.