There’s actually decades of research done on driver attentiveness and safety - these systems fly in the face of all the conclusions of that research and make a number of existing problems much worse.
One can also look at research done around autopilot systems in airplanes, which will dump control back on human pilots in extreme situations - there’s a move towards keeping control in the hands of the autopilot in such situations, even if it generally doesn’t fly as well as a human, just because the human pilots tend to become confused when suddenly handed back control and have a much higher likelihood of crashing in those situations (compared to having been in control the whole time).
So… yeah, it’s a well known problem that’s been thoroughly researched, and you can look it up.
Except that we know that, in general, safety features can increase reckless behavior, and specifically with Teslas, that the autopilot causes people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t (including deliberately taking a nap). We also know that the less demanding driving is, the more likely drivers are to “zone out” or fall asleep. So it’s highly likely they were only asleep because they were in a car with active “autopilot.”
(Given the number of publicized accidents involving Tesla drivers ignoring the road while on autopilot, it would be interesting to see accident rates. I’d be willing to bet they’re actually worse than those of other modern vehicles with comparable safety features but no autopilot.)
