Why the US government should take Tesla up on its offer to share Autopilot data

Professor John Dolan, principal systems scientist in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, said that Tesla’s data, in terms of mileage, is “extremely impressive, and nearly two orders of magnitude greater than the number of autonomously driven miles (1.5 million) reported for the Google self-driving cars.” Still, Dolan wonders how directly relatable to autonomous driving Tesla’s Autopilot data is. While Musk cites a 50% drop in accidents, based on his data, the fact that Autopilot asks drivers to be fully engaged means that accidents may be averted based on human intervention. While the driving may be safer than self-driving, Dolan wonders if it’s “a fair comparison between straight human driving and Autopilot driving with presumably highly (perhaps unusually) attentive human overwatch.”