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I don't think autopilot is included to improve their current product, but rather to give them a head start on full autonomy. I think the reason they've rolled it out is so they can crowdsource the testing of their software. I'm just speculating here, but I would guess that this has allowed them to collect vastly more test data than uber and waymo at a fraction of the cost and liability.

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It seems that Tesla's vast amounts of data is mostly useless. After all, there's a heavy concentration of drivers in the Bay Area (where they're based) but all that local data didn't stop a Tesla from slamming into the concrete divider and killing it's driver. On top of that, Tesla's collecting data from two very different sets of sensors, which are not compatible with each other (i.e., the original MobiEye suite and their home-built alternative), so all of the millions of miles collected with the MobiEye sensor suite is useless for their own sensor suite.

Waymo may have less data, but it's data appears to be far more useful.

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