“Well, I think it is to be expected that people are going to do things that they’ve been told not to do with new technology,” says John Dolan with the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon. “There were stories years ago about people using lawn mowers to clip their hedges and cutting their fingers off, things like that. There’s a legitimate question as to whether or not Tesla did it too early. It’s also possible that the traditional automakers would wait until too late to bring a technology out.”
People get killed every day in regular cars, so why all the attention over this one fatality? Because it involves a technology that’s expected to revolutionize the industry — and Tesla has been way out front. “The way Tesla has handled Autopilot, which is sort of in beta testing out in the real world, is not something that a traditional automaker would do,” says Michelle Krebs, a senior analyst with AutoTrader.com.