> It does all this with zero input from the driver, who Honda says can "watch television/DVD on the navigation screen or operate the navigation system to search

> It does all this with zero input from the driver, who Honda says can "watch television/DVD on the navigation screen or operate the navigation system to search for a destination address." So another batch of dangerous "half-self-driving" cars is hitting the streets, encouraging drivers to disengage from the wheel but ignoring the fact that distracted people tend to remain distracted much longer than their automated car desires. There is no such thing as "Level 3 automation", because driving is a wholesome intelectual endeavor that cannot be compartmentalized. You cannot drop a distracted driver in a life or death trafic situation, an expect them to correct course efficiently. Driving includes route planning, optical recognition of static and dynamic road conditions, trajectory prediction of other trafic participants, as well as being aware of the dynamic parameters of your own vehicle and predicting how your inputs will reflect into future trajectory. The brain is essentially a giant prediction machine, as explained yesterday by an article here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26341218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26341218 This is a continuous loop where an attentive driver maintains state information from a large time period, from seconds to hours: this is slippery and curvy road section, a certain road sign was spotted a mile ago, the gray Honda following drives erratically, there is a kid with a ball and a cat on the sidewalk, the wheel is slightly tilted to right to match trajectory. There is no way to partition this activity into "simple" self-driving tasks that can be automated and "complex" things a man can drop in and do. It's all or nothing. Once the man looks away from the road for half a minute, he has lost critical state information that affords him human level driving accuracy, and it would take minutes to warm up again, including gradual increase of control authority. His role in a "Level 3 self-driving car" is essentially that of the monkey to take the blame.