Seizures and strokes behind the wheel is far more prevalent then people think. I can't speak for the entire USA, but having had a family member who suffered for that for years, the second someone has seizures, doctors usually work to revoke their licenses immediately.
So yes, Autopilot does saves lives. We know how many people have died with autopilot on, and I suspect it's a fraction of thoose who die with it off. Autopilot does some things poorly, somethings far better then a human can do. It's a technology with it's strengths and weaknesses. In my case, I was on autopilot driving through Denver, when the car suddenly swerved out of the lane into a adjacent lane. I freaked out thinking the system was going wonky.
Turns out that some drunk "street driving enthusiasts" decided to have a Race on I-70, and one of them missed that the lane he was trying to merge into from my rear right was occupied by a truck. It was in my blind spot, so while I was paying attention to the front of the car, autopilot was monitoring where my eyes could not.
In californium, I was driving a Tesla in Cueprtino on a fairly busy highway but late at night. The car started doing it's "pay attention now" beeps, a second before I realized that someone was driving the wrong way on my side of the freeway.
Would either of these been a fatality? Probably not, but possibly so.
People fall asleep all the time behind wheels. They plot into parked cars all the time. They drive in the wrong side of the road. They plow into emergency vehicles.
Anything we can that makes things safer is nothing but good.
I bought a early Model 3 - and i will tell you that Autopilot is night and day better now then it was. The evolution wasn't in hardware, but in software. As more people use it, the software and hardware get bigger.
