Terrifying scenarios are described in the article. This is obviously nothing more than (very) advanced lane assistance and absolutely requires fully observant drivers who might have to take over the wheel in the fraction of a second.
The article is correct that expecting average drivers to do this without training is a high risk move. I've given flight instruction, taking over a landing 20ft off the ground is way harder than landing a plane yourself. And that's with a lot of training, not just an average driver being put in a place to supervise Tesla autopilot with no training at all.
Isn't that exactly the definition of cruise control ?
I'm sorry but I won't be driving a car without cruise control anymore: cruise control saves oil and is much more comfortable.
I imagined it was something you could enable and then disable by just breaking like cruise control or auto parking with toyotas.
But now I see how complex it becomes because of the wheel, even tesla owners in the comments of the article don't like to let their hands off the wheel.
Prime example would be the Uber test driver who felt she could trust the car enough to watch a TV show on her phone, when she was supposed to be supervising it.
Plus our attention naturally just starts to wander when the talk at hand is not that engaging.
Current Teslas allow Autopilot on the streets, it just tries to go forward on the intersections (with FSD it also tries to take turns). Stops on the lights and stop signs, btw. So the way you use it, you engage it on the long stretch, where it knows what to do, and monitor on the intersection. If it tries to take wrong lane on the intersection, you interfere. On simple intersections it goes through just fine. All this without FSD Beta.
Is it autonomous? No. Is it way less tiring to drive a car, when you don’t have to do lane keeping, speed control and traffic light stops yourself all the time? Absolutely.
For most people, lane keeping and speed control is ingrained enough they do it subconsciously.
That's not just theory, the article describes there have been 3 serious accidents already with "self driving" Teslas that crashed while being monitored by the driver.
Is that really obvious? It looks like the system is aware of much more than just lanes. A lane assist system doesn't stop for red lights or stop signs, or make left turns into a side road after waiting for oncoming traffic to clear.