Or are you suggesting that there are Tesla owners who are (a) sitting in their driveway wondering why their car isn't driving them to work or (b) returning their cars upon finding out many of the features on the Autopilot page require regulatory approval?
Tesla driver caught turning on autopilot and leaving driver’s seat on motorway Culprit admits he knew what he had done was ‘silly’ but that the car was capable of something ‘amazing’
It's really not that deceptive. People would have to be a lot dumber than they actually are to be confused about it.
I'd say that if they're claiming to be able to deliver full self-driving autonomy to existing cars via purely a SOFTWARE upgrade, then that's pretty deceptive, since I am pretty sure not even Tesla knows exactly what hardware might be required for such capability. They'll know when they build it, but not before.
That's one level past dishonest. Honest advertising would just be "none of our cars have full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver".
But this is on another level. Have they ever actually ran software that does, indeed, have this capability? Or do they have a detailed enough specification of that software, so that they can verify that it will, indeed, run on that hardware once it's written?
It's probably a safe bet that they haven't, and they don't, and in fact there is no way to verify that the hardware is in fact capable of running such software. This is likely a good engineering bet (i.e. the hardware is probably enough to support their current software approach, and they'll hit the software's limitations before they hit the hardware's), but advertising engineering bets as safety-related selling points is really irresponsible. Bet with your own money all you want, but not with people's lives.
Who's to know if there isn't a third key component necessary for that, behind yet another technical term?
Isn't Tesla's autopilot doing better than humans do in the same number of miles? We just all hear about it every time a Tesla is in a crash. If we heard about every human driver car accident, it would be overwhelming.
edit:
from this article: https://electrek.co/2018/03/30/tesla-autopilot-fatal-crash-d...
In the US, there is one automotive fatality every 86 million miles across all vehicles from all manufacturers. For Tesla, there is one fatality, including known pedestrian fatalities, every 320 million miles in vehicles equipped with Autopilot hardware. If you are driving a Tesla equipped with Autopilot hardware, you are 3.7 times less likely to be involved in a fatal accident.
Disclosure: I am one of the co-authors
every 320 million miles in vehicles equipped with Autopilot hardware.
does not mean 320 million miles with autopilot controlling the vehicle. Who knows how many of those miles are human driven?
Since a Tesla is often owned by people with better economic means, their statistics is not representative of all vehicles. The average vehicular fatality rate of this demographics and vehicle type could be well below that of Tesla with Autopilot.
What is the accident statistic for Teslas not equipped with Autopilot hardware?
If Autopilot enabled cars are so much safer than human drivers, can they pass a written and road side driver's license test?