Economite
Member
It doesn't work that way. AP isn't like a product that's developed and tested. It's a machine that learns. There's no way to replicate the real-world experience that AP is gaining. That's why Uber and other autonomous programs are out on the streets even with the risks as Uber discovered in AZ.
Yup... But Uber and the other companies are testing and refining their autonomous vehicles using (supposedly) trained safety drivers who are specifically trying to test features of the autonomous system. That is also largely how other manufacturers seem to have tested/developed their L2/L3 systems. Tesla seems to be unique (or pretty darn close to unique) in terms of releasing to owners a system at an early stage of development with so little guidance on how it should be used and so few use restrictions. This seems to reflect (i) a release schedule that was accelerated because Tesla sold features before they were actually ready and then was pressured by owners to actually finally release something, (ii) a willingness of Tesla to let its owners figure out how the system works through experimentation (rather than restrictions/instructions), (iii) Tesla's notion that it can always just fix/improve things OTA, (iv) Tesla's relative willingness to use its owners as more-or-less-willing guinea pigs for testing, and (v) Tesla's general belief that existing industry practices (in manufacturing, supply chain, testing, development, sales, and pretty much everything else) are inefficient, expensive and time consuming and should be redesigned from the ground up by taking what other manufacturers would consider to be shortcuts.
As the recent articles about Tesla's problems with improperly screened Chinese suppliers and designing a factory with too many robots is showing, taking shortcuts to save money or quicken processes often backfires. It seems to me that this is also occurring when Tesla seems to be doing less in-house, pre-release testing of features than would traditionally have been done.