While the erratic behavior of Tesla’s autopilot might cause other drivers to be more cautious are them, I don’t think you should count this in Tesla’s favor. Imagine if every self thriving car company started adding code to scare other drivers, that would definitely have unwanted side effects.
Teslas have one crash for every 4.31 million miles driven with autopilot engaged versus one crash per every 480k for non-Tesla drivers, so autopilot is averting almost 90% of all crashes. There’s no evidence at all of any “it scares other drivers into safety” mechanism, which is to be expected because such a mechanism seems absurd on its face.
This article is specifically referring to fantom breaking rather than overall performance of the system.
I know I personally have started to stay further from Tesla’s when possible on the road because they behave strangely. But the same applies to other cars which do this odd weaving from side to side within their lanes presumably because of poorly implemented lane keeping systems.
As to accidents rates, Autopilot shouldn’t be compared to overall driving accident rates when it’s not being used in all situations.
Probably. Tesla Autopilot gets in about 90% fewer accidents per hundred million miles than US drivers. It would be shocking if this didn’t manifest as lives saved.
