[adorno]

The Tesla crash that produced one dead, was not with a fully autonomous vehicle. In fact, that Tesla was equipped with more or less level-3 "autonomy", meaning that, it really wasn't worthy of being used for any kind of autonomy, since it required the driver to keep his eyes on the road and his hands on the wheel; IOW, it was mostly gimmicky, and meant to get people excited about Tesla being on the edge of technology. The driver was actually very careless, since he wasn't supposed to assume that the car could handle any condition on the road. Tesla did correct for that kind of situation.

Fully autonomous means that, a person could go to sleep in the car while the car takes him from point A to point B, with no expectation of the rider being involved at all. Point A and B could be any points on a map, at any distance and in very difficult driving conditions, like heavy city traffic like you'd find in NY City or L.A. In fact, there was a test where a fully autonomous vehicle drove from California to NYC, with no driver intervention at all, other than monitoring and data gathering.

https://qz.com/363350/americas-longest-autonomous-drive-from-california-to-new-york-starts-this-weekend/

A completely autonomous vehicle like you describe, may never be possible, just like there will never be a perfect human. If humans

[Alberta's Child]

One item in that article caught my eye:

The car will only drive itself on highways; an engineer will take over on smaller roads.

In other words, the car will only drive itself under the most ideal conditions.

I didn't see any follow-up articles indicating whether the test was successful. I'd be interested to see what they learned.

In my line of work, it's becoming more clear that automated vehicle technology is going to be caught between two conflicting challenges for the foreseeable future. Most people will tend to either trust the technology too much (like the Tesla driver who didn't pay any attention to the road), or too little (in which case they won't be willing to pay a premium for the technology).