Self driving cars are just that, marketing. Tesla for all their hype have limited driver assist only and even Google who seem to have the most advanced offering only works in limited areas in good conditions and the dataset that drives it requires lots of maintenance.
The general problem is too hard, and general practice has some of the same problems. Probably less adversarial data, but there’s still litigation to be had from confusing an AI GP. Or narcotics.
It's unpredictable enough that it should be considered just "limited driver assist". Only a fool would look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ub2F-UnXIU and go "yeah, that's full self-driving, all right." Slapping a "beta" label on it means nothing - you could be talking about how Gmail was in beta, or you could be talking about Fallout 76.
Tesla's marketing is extremely disingenuous, IMO. The name of your product creates expectations in peoples' minds, and sure, you can absolve yourself of liability by putting in the fine print "this isn't anywhere close to true FSD and your car might not be powerful enough to support it by the time we get there, so you gotta keep your hands on the wheel," but that doesn't make it right.
If they called it "advanced driver assist" or something similar, I'd be fine with it (it is more advanced than traditional driver assistance tools like cruise control and lane departure warnings, after all). But I doubt they could get people to pay $10k or whatever the current price is if they were more honest. Instead, they would prefer to earn more money by slapping that FSD label on it and letting people immediately turn their brains off.
In aggregate, Tesla’s FSD is demonstrably not up to the task. “Limited driver assist” is a much more fair assessment of what their software is actually capable of than the “full self driving” branding.
Tesla advertises their technology as being on the cusp of Level 4/5 applications but legally (when defending its actions to the California DMV) argue that it is and will continue to be a Level 2 (i.e. limited driver assist) into the future and that FSD beta should not fall under regulations concerning testing of L4/L5 autonomous vehicles.
Perhaps most importantly, all legal responsibility falls on the driver, regardless of the fact that the car can cause accidents faster than a human can realistically react even if paying perfect attention.
