I think we should look at this probabilistically. Yes, autopilot should be improved to prevent this, but no system is perfect. Certainly not human drivers. IMO

I think we should look at this probabilistically. Yes, autopilot should be improved to prevent this, but no system is perfect. Certainly not human drivers. IMO the correct comparison is whether Teslas are on average more likely to hit firetrucks while on autopilot than normal vehicles while being driven by humans. I'm sure this data most likely won't be forthcoming, but I think it's important to keep in mind that we should be looking at accidents fleet-wide and not in isolation. Autonomously driven cars will have accidents. More importantly, their failure modes will be different than human drivers. However, as soon as they are even a small margin safer than human drivers, their adoption would save lives. Besides, the systems will continue to get better. Human drivers have proven stubbornly difficult to improve. We ought not reject autonomous driving technology only because it sometimes gets in accidents that appear to be strange or arbitrary to us. I consider the carnage perpetrated by human drivers to be arbitrary, but most people just take death on the roads as a fact of life.