Google I'm totally cool with. They've been at this a long time and still don't seem very close to actually releasing a product.
I like Tesla's and what Elon's accomplished has been impressive but he seems hellbent on "winning the race" to release a self driving car and that worries me.
I wish it were possible to buy a Tesla without any autopilot features except basic cruise control, because I know how damnably difficult the edge cases are for a self-driving car, and I'm perfectly capable of driving a car manually, thank you very much. Tesla's cars are so good I'd almost be willing to pay more for one without autopilot.
While driving, you have to do a double-pull on the lever to activate the autopilot, a single pull just activates the basic cruise control. So you can still buy one and just never activate it.
Alternatively, earlier editions of Model S shipped without autopilot, which was then sold as an aftermarket upgrade as late as this spring (when autopilot was an optional $2,500 package on a new Model S).
Fair enough re: the older Teslas. As to the new ones, even if I never activate autopilot I'm still driving around in a massive autopilot data collection engine for Tesla Corp, which bugs me.
Reminds me of wanting to buy a TV without all the "smart" stuff. In that situation modularity is preferred by most people with at least minimal tech-inclination. I actually encountered some cases of manufacturers charging more for a lesser, non-smart panel.
A car is a bit more complicated to leave stuff out I am sure and the volumes far different. It would likely require at least more resources to have separate parts of lines for some of that as well as different check procedures as so on. But like you said, paying more could help offset that, though it's a gamble for the manufacturer.
I'm more in the camp of please do not release anything driving a car until you guys can figure out how to secure basic software, keep websites running, parse input properly, and so on. In other words, I'd rather them wait decades if that's what it takes.
Personally, I'd rather be killed by a person rather than a person's dumb choice trusting technology. What concerns me in all these situations is that I did not at any point agree or vote to allow someone in a self-driving car to drive on the same road as me. Until they can mathematically prove 100% it is safe in all conditions and situations, I'm not buying things like "driver assist" if a big part of the justification is that AI is better than a human driver (if so, then why assist?). Others may disagree, so be it - I'm a weird guy. I also hate cruise control. And fat-free ice cream.
It's a good concern to have, but I also worry about waiting too long here. At the end of the day, there's going to be problems that the testing would have never found regardless of how much testing there is, and we need to be psychologically prepared for that.
It took airplanes a long time to become safe (through a long and scary process), and now they're safer than my front porch. Whatever the outcome, self driving cars will very likely be safer than human drivers, and that means more lives are saved than lost, even with the occasional horrific problem. It is entirely plausible that self driving cars are already safer than human ones.
I like Tesla's and what Elon's accomplished has been impressive but he seems hellbent on "winning the race" to release a self driving car and that worries me.