Tesla insists that Autopilot is safe and only fails when drivers are distracted.
That can mean one of 2 things:
Autopilot is safe and will drive you anywhere you want to go safely, unless you get distracted, then it goes into "unsafe" mode and attempts to kill the driver. I doubt this is what they are trying to say with that statement, so number 2 is the most likely.
Its double-speak of epic proportions because the statement itself is implying Autopilot isn't safe since it requires an alert driver to be ready to correct it. Its either "safe" or it isn't. If its not "safe" without intervention, then its not safe and to claim otherwise is fucking delusional. At least state the truth, the autopilot is prone to mistakes and requires a human to pay attention to ensure the vehicle is being driven safely. The autopilot is most definitely not "safe".
I think what they mean is that it's safe to recover into manual driving mode, as in it won't get stuck in auto pilot mode if you need to take over.
Of course they shouldn't have called it fucking auto pilot then. They want the marketing but not the responsibility. If it were called something like driver assist it would communicate what it's supposed to do better.
This is the main problem with "auto-driving" features right now. They work well enough that the driver stops paying attention to the road, but not well enough to be 100% accident free. This allows the auto manufacturers to point to distracted drivers as the cause.
We probably need something like an insurance fund paid for by the makers of the technology to handle the claims that come in. It would force the manufacturers to be a lot more cautious of rolling out these features.