Re: Not an "autopilot"
Let me follow your logic. The person of your concern has a medical condition that prevents them from driving. They have enough money to live on their own rather than share, but not enough money to move somewhere closer to their employment and their employment is such that they cannot easily find a job that is more conveniently located. And the way you suggest that they may make this work is to buy a US$75,000 car which has a feature that can drive by itself up until the moment it can't.
Yeah, no. Self driving cars will be an amazing source of freedom to many people with medical conditions, elderly, disabled, even people under the influence of alcohol or other drugs. This certainly should not be understated as a benefit, but the problem is where certain people who should know better imply the technology is more advanced than it is, then run for the hills when it isn't.
I want to see manufacturers put their money where their mouth is before they are allowed to imply the car has an autopilot or similar technology. If they paid you out a million dollars if your car was at fault in an accident whilst self driving, and 10 million if that accident resulted in a permanent injury for anyone involved, and 100 million to the family of anyone killed, you might find that companies such as this are a lot more restrained when making these claims.
What worries me here isn't the failure of some sensor, but that we see a company not acknowledging that the design of their system (even down to its name) incorrectly encourages people to trust it beyond its capabilities. That is a design flaw. It needs to be rectified. Maybe it needs to pull itself over and stop if the driver isn't paying attention. When a plane crashes, Boeing or Airbus don't sit back and say well pilot/ground crew screwed up here, case closed. No, they figure out why their safety processes and systems didn't fire or were ignored, and implement changes in both instructions, design and training programs to make it less likely. I'm seeing none of that here. It's entirely about saving their reputation. Until that culture changes, I don't want these things on my roads.