From the article: “Our data shows that Tesla owners have driven this same stretch of highway with Autopilot engaged roughly 85,000 times since Autopilot was first rolled out in 2015 and roughly 20,000 times since just the beginning of the year, and there has never been an accident that we know of. There are over 200 successful Autopilot trips per day on this exact stretch of road.”
It seems like Tesla is trying to explain-away that particular incident as a one-off statistical outlier, and not the fault of the autopilot system. Appealing to statistics like that seems like an attempt to deny responsibility to me.
That rationalization actually makes it _worse_ for me; it suggests they have no idea why this happened.
But unless the person doing the video faked it, there's no question what happened: the car is driving down I-94 and veers out of its lane towards a concrete median until it's stopped by the operator.
With the advent of this video I'm expecting Telsa to disable Autopilot across the entire fleet within another couple of hours.
Anything less would be denial and warrant some head honcho at some regulator with teeth, and probably the FBI, turn up at Musk's house and drag him away.
From your second link, in Tesla's own words:
"The driver had about five seconds and 150 meters of unobstructed view of the concrete divider with the crushed crash attenuator, but the vehicle logs show that no action was taken."
What they didn't write is that the car also had an unobstructed view of the crash attenuator.
Stop calling Autopilot. It's adaptive cruise control, so call it that.
They did not denied but they just don' tell us what we wanted to know, they did not tell us if the car tried to stop, if it detected an obstacle, if it actually called the alarm in that moment or minutes before, they just said aonlyu what the facts that are not damming for them.
"Our data shows that Tesla owners have driven this same stretch of highway [thousands of times with no trouble]" reads as a denial, implying the crash was a one-off non-reproducible fluke, which the video certainly disproves.
I can really see why Tesla would try to deny this so hard, seeing it happen yourself is frightening.