There’s too much insanity over building new tech these days, and I find a lot of hate directed on Autopilot, to stem from hate directed on Elon. Let’s go over the basics for Autopilot:
1. It costs thousands of dollars a year + 15k one time and it’s very easy to get banned from autopilot for life. They have a 3 strike rule + 1000 miles driven on your Tesla with a good safety before you’re allowed to access autopilot
2. I’ve seen 2 types of customers use autopilot. One is rich dudes, who buy it just to have all bells and whistles. They use it less than once a month and honestly it’s a waste of money for them. The other are passionate early adopters, they regularly make YouTube videos, constantly stress test our tech and are huge contributors of our tech itself. I’d say 10-20% of our users are the latter. The kind of group who don’t use autopilot? The regular old Joe, who perhaps would like Autopilot for some practical use case. It’s too expensive, has a lot of restrictions (like you have to grab the steering once every few minutes or autopilot disengages and then you get banned out of it even if you pay) that it doesn’t make sense for him to buy this tech anyway. In essence, this is not tech that is being used by regular people who have a chance of misusing it. Ever since the Uber self driving crash, heads roll if a self driving car crashes and as an engineer I don’t get any access to Tesla legal but it’s my understanding that in none of the cases filed against Tesla, did they prove Autopilot was active (forget Autopilot being the cause).
So yes, we’re not building new tech that’s killing hundreds, no one has any ethical dilemmas here. We’re building tech that a passionate group of users really want to see succeed and help us do that, and rest of the users just give us money for some reason even though they don’t really use it or trust it. I would frankly be more torn about working in a place like Waymo where the user has almost no control over the car (they don’t even sit at the steering wheel), and they have to solve the problem one shot before releasing it to the public while Tesla can keep iterating step by step (with its passionate user base supporting us and showing love all the way)
Edit: Changed this comment to make it smaller