my guess is, without any insider information, they were (or at least would be) willing to deal with negative pr, for the amount of data this program is likely t

my guess is, without any insider information, they were (or at least would be) willing to deal with negative pr, for the amount of data this program is likely to get.' While google (and many others) have been working on self-driving cars/testing systems, Tesla is a car company with many active vehicles. They benefit from huge fleets of vehicles (comparative to other autonomous car companies not car manufacturers) of which to test. So releasing this product and having potentially 50-100K people using it daily as well as over millions of miles logged could be net worth it. They probably assumed (and likely calculated) a falure mode would be non-lethal/minimal dents and very small risk of human life. So they would allow the tech out there early and hope that a lot of this data helped to improve the vehicles. It isn't PC to say, but this is how humans have learned most things. Being 90% something works, and then getting last 10 percent by learning what not to do which often comes at with a cost as high as human life. For example, the Challenger mission was a tradgedy and we, and very unfortunately some brave men and woman, paid a price for us to learn how to protect those future astronauts.