They’re talking about avoiding legal liability, not about actually doing the right thing. And of course you can see how it would help them avoid legal liability. The lawyers will walk into court and honestly say that at the time of the accident the human driver was in control of the vehicle.

And then that creates a discussion about how much time the human driver has to have in order to actually solve the problem, or gray areas about who exactly controls what when, and it complicates the situation enough where maybe Tesla can pay less money for the deaths that they are obviously responsible for.

Rather than say that this is a failure of public education, I think it might be more instructed to think of it as the conservative movement succeeding. In many communities, it’s considered rude to bring up things that will upset people, and that typically includes political topics. You can’t point out that the police chief is running a scam, for example, because that would embarrass the mayor who hired the police chief, and that would make you rude for embarrassing them… That kind of thought, the blind pro establishment view, is a strong part of culture in many areas of the country.

(And I’m using the word conservative here to refer to the people currently in power keeping power, not specifically to refer to the Republican party.)

Nobody can keep themselves out of politics. It just doesn’t work that way, because politics works its way into your life wherever you go. You can choose not talk about it, which is typically an endorsement of the status quo, and that in itself is a clear political message that you’re sending to people around you.