NHTSA’s full final investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash ratereduction

Lets hide the facts and baffle 'em with numbers and BS

40% is across the board meaning all of them.

I'll still never touch one. Outside of the cost of those ugly cars the auto pilot feature seems ridiculous to me. It's one thing to have it with aircraft where the only obstacle is other aircraft that typically have to be miles apart and the ground. Even still with autopilot in aircraft the pilot takes over for taxi, take-off and landing and pilots are required to always be aware and be ready to take manual control over at any time. Right now it's possible with Tesla but the logic is that people want fully autonomous vehicles to be the only vehicles on the road one day. I can't even imagine what kind of wrecks we'll see when someone gives full control over to the computer.

For starters you face hacking issues. They may be secure systems right now but hackers get smarter every day and it's only a matter of time before some jackass in their basement figures out how to tap into the autopilot and take control from their home computer. When that happens there's no doubt in my mind that people will start exploiting the feature for malicious activities, whether it be stealing the car by hacking it right in the owner's driveway or causing massive wrecks for their own entertainment.

Then you've got unexpected road hazards. Potholes, tree limbs and branches, ice, rain, etc. How much have they tested autopilot in hazardous road conditions? All I ever really see with testing of driverless vehicles is them being tested in perfect weather conditions which may exist in California usually but it's not always like that anywhere else. I trust people more than a computer to be able to recover from loss of control or at the very least steer themselves into the ditch if they start sliding rather than into traffic.

If autonomous cars start to get more widespread usage I hope that what happens is special roadways specifically for them and keeping them restricted to those roadways rather than allowing them to intermix and eventually replace human controlled vehicles. We are hitting a point in technology where we are treading into deep waters and getting way ahead of ourselves trying to push new technologies out into the market. One of these days this reliance is going to bite us in the ass.