Why is it every time self-driving comes up, proponents act like there's nothing between forging ahead towards L5 and improving over an unaided driver?

Currently AP's "self-driving" features cannot save a life, they have killed people.

To understand that better, examine AP in finer detail:

Teslas have safety features that can intervene when the current situation seems to be leading to an accident. Let's call those correction. Those can (and have) save lives.

Tesla also has features that are supposed to be more convenient for the driver. The claim is they take a load off for the driver. Call those the convenience features.

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The convenience features have not evolved to the point where you are ever allowed to be less vigilant than you would be otherwise! By definition if AP is driving, you too must be fully attentive and "driving" hence the increasingly intrusive detection which has now evolved to detecting wheel input every 15 seconds...

Now realize that while for the sake of examination I'm describing convenience vs correction, these are all systems in one car. You can get the correction features without FSD, but you can't get the inverse.

Because of this, the convenience features alone cannot avoid an accident that the avoidance systems would not have.

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This is tricky to think about, but consider a driver who would have drifted off the road without AP. As soon as the driver deviates too far from what AP would have done and starts touching a lane marker, the lane detection systems realize there's an issue and correct.

However, say there's a tricky lane marking where the correction system wrongly believes the driver input is wrong. They get an alert and an attempt at correcting steering inputs.

But because the driver is already inputting a direction with full intention, this wrong input is already actively being overridden by the human who plotted their turn and can clearly sense that they should fight the suggested input before they end up running off the road.

With the convenience features enabled, the driver's input will come after the wrong action has already been taken!

If the avoidance systems knew that the convenience feature was about to send you into a jersey barrier... the convenience feature wouldn't be "allowed" to send you into a jersey barrier!

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I want to see studies that focus on the safety of driving with full driving aids but without convenience features. Claims that you are less tired from using them show that it's an inherently unsafe practice since you should be exactly as vigilant as normal.

Because of what's explained above, the expectation would be that there is no drop in safety if your car only corrects when there is a hazard... but there is a drop in safety when you are falsely lulled into a sense of safety.

To me WIP self-driving should be monitored by trained people. It shouldn't be a box you get to tick in your infotainment screen.

If Tesla wants to carefully pick who's allowed to run these betas more power to them, but the number of idiotic videos I can pull up right now of people intentionally testing FSD updates in situations they know are hairy and risking other people's safety is insane.

That is just setting up self-driving to be dead on arrival.