Automation has more or less taken over the airline industry. The people in the cockpit are turning less into pilots and more into a manager of the system, who looks at all the readings and makes sure everything is running smoothly. Overall it's helped safety significantly.

With automation encroaching on the car industry as well, I feel there are certain aspects of human nature that developers have to address. One major difference between airplanes and cars are the people running it. Although I said pilots are flying less now, they're still trained for the situation and what to look for. And they're not allowed to fly very often so they can be fully rested for whatever situation may arise. Compare that to Joe Schmo who just came from work and is tired. Do you honestly believe he will have the same type of heightened awareness? Hell no. Unless they're personally engaged with the activity, people will mostly like to daydream, look at their phone, maybe even take a nap. They are not going to be prepared for something like this:

And it would ridiculous for the developers to think a person can. Even in planes pilots are not always ready: That AirFrance crash in the Atlantic back in 2009 is attributed to the automation stopping due to ice freezing over the speed indicators. Not fully understanding what was happening, the pilots could not handle suddenly flying the plane manually. But in a way expecting people to pay attention at the wheel somewhat negates the point: Yeah, we say automation will increase safety, which is probably would, but really we're doing this so we can all fuck around when driving instead of actually having to live with the monotony of the process. Tesla's still in a test phase even if people are on the road with it, so I'm expecting the programming to improve in the future. At the moment though, Tesla needs to realize once people become comfortable with automation, they're going to start playing Pokémon Go instead of keeping their eyes on the road.