The legality of a pilot watching a movie is irrelevant to the discussion. It's legal for the person in the driver's seat to watch a movie with Mercedes' level 3 "Drive Pilot" active (in certain locations). A cop pulling you over is only wasting the time of everyone involved.

And I argue that it should not be legal, just as it's not legal for a pilot: https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/11/5402484/new-faa-rule-keep...

A car at even 20 MPH has a tremendous amount of kinetic energy, and we are all well aware of the destructive consequences of rapid deceleration when large amounts of energy are involved, particularly when fleshy human bodies are involved. There exists no other system with anything close to a comparable level of risk where we do not require or at least expect a human to be actively monitoring the system and ready to take action in the event of a problem.

I'm not saying we should ban Level whatever auto magic AI driving. All I'm saying is that we should use the same standards of responsible operation that we apply to literally every other area of human activity. Why does driving get a free pass?

Which locations are those?

California and Nevada. From the first sentence of the article:

> Mercedes-Benz is the first automaker to gain approval to sell a Level 3 automated driving system in the United States; the first customer-owned S-Class and EQS sedans in California and Nevada equipped with the Drive Pilot system hit dealer lots this month.

Does level 3 not legally require an attentive operator in those jurisdictions?

Correct, and that is also answered very early in the article.

autopilot is a level 2 system technically, so you are right, they don’t use a system incorrectly