I disagree. In a car with normal or even advanced cruise control, the driver would still be paying attention to the road and ostensibly would have seen the truck ahead and applied the brakes. Autopilot makes it very easy to not pay attention at all and let the car drive itself for minutes at a time.

I'm sure you'll say, "yes but that's a driver attention problem, not a technology problem", but to me they're the same thing. If you give drivers technology that encourages them to not pay attention then accidents caused as a result of that are partially your fault.

Or maybe it's just a human behavior problem, and unfortunately it may take a few accidents of this type to train ourselves that AI assist doesn't mean we can lessen our attention.

Especially after hearing about incidents like this, you won't find me going through my email while letting "autopilot" do its thing. I don't think I would before this, but there's certainly a lower probability that I would now. I'm being trained.

That's the same as blaming your car company for getting speeding tickets when you used cruise control. How many of those letters have you sent out?

No, it's not the same at all. With cruise control you are still fully in control of your car and necessarily aware of how fast you are going and what is going on in your surroundings. With Autopilot that is simply not the case - the technology virtually begs you to set it and then play with your phone or the touchscreen instead of paying attention to the road, text warnings be damned.

If you want an actually applicable analogy, I'll pull one I've used before. Say you buy an oven that has this great auto-baking feature that lets you just put some cookie dough inside it and then come back whenever you want, even hours later, to have fresh baked cookies waiting. That's how it's marketed - the AutoBake Oven. Except the manufacturer says that you're still supposed to watch the oven at all times in case something goes wrong. So you make some cookies with it and they turn out great, and nothing goes wrong. And hey, it's the AutoBake Oven, right? It says it will bake things automatically so you don't have to worry about them for hours at a time. So you logically decide to put some dough in there and then go the grocery store for a few minutes to get some items for dinner. And you come back and your house burned down because the AutoBake Oven lit itself on fire due to having subpar sensors and beta software in it. Now tell me you wouldn't file a lawsuit against the manufacturer.

A lot of modern cars have cruise control with radar for keeping distance to the car in front. Some use the same sensor to auto brake for obstacles at city speeds. I'm sure some will also alert for obstacles at highway speeds, but likely don't auto break then, for safety reasons.