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Even as automakers and technology companies have been promoting a euphoric vision of the future in which cars will drive themselves and serious crashes will be rare, their engineers have been engaged in a sobering debate.

Just how autonomous can and should cars become? the engineers are asking. Is there an inherent danger in technology that invites human drivers to sit back and relax — but still requires them to be ready to hit the brakes or grab the wheel at the first sign of trouble?

Those questions have taken on a new urgency after the revelation this week that the driver of a Tesla Model S died in a crash in Florida while the electric car was operating in its Autopilot mode.

The man, Joshua Brown, 40, of Canton, Ohio, was driving on a divided highway, when a tractor-trailer truck made a left turn and crossed in front of Mr. Brown’s lane of traffic. Tesla said neither Mr. Brown nor the car’s self-driving system noticed the white truck against a bright sky, and the brakes were never applied.

For now, other automakers are giving no sign of slowing down their efforts to push forward with cars that can drive themselves. But mainly they say the technology isn’t ready yet — which for many is an implicit rebuke of Tesla’s willingness to tempt tech-minded drivers to turn tomorrow’s vision into today’s road reality.

On Friday, even as the world was absorbing news of Mr. Brown’s death as the first known fatality of the autonomous driving revolution, the German automaker BMW said it intended to offer a “self-driving car” — but not until 2021. And it will have much different technology than is now available on the Tesla Model S.

“Today we are standing at the brink of a new revolution,” Harald Krüger, BMW chief executive, said at a news conference in Munich.

Mr. Krüger added that the Tesla crash was “really very sad” and said BMW would need “the next few years” to perfect its autonomous driving system. “Today the technologies are not ready for serious production,” he said.

The world’s largest carmaker, Toyota, is a notable holdout in the rush toward completely autonomous cars. Last year, the company said that it would invest $1 billion in a Silicon Valley-based research effort to focus on cars that will function as “guardian angels,” saving human drivers from errors, rather than replacing them.

Tesla, which started its Autopilot feature last fall, has emphasized in discussing Mr. Brown’s death that the system isn’t intended to take over complete control of the car and that drivers must keep their hands on the steering wheel and remain alert and engaged.

The point highlights the difference in approach that separates companies working on self-driving technology.

Ford Motor, Google, Volvo and others are aiming at offering fully autonomous cars that can operate safely without human intervention at all — an approach engineers call Level 4 automated driving. Those companies are wary of semiautonomous, or Level 3, technology that can drive the car for stretches of road under certain circumstances, but requires drivers to be ready to take over.

Tesla’s Autopilot is not even a fully fledged Level 3 technology, and some experts say it is a risky approach.

“There’s a huge inherent danger and it’s well proven — the computer making a mistake and the driver not taking over quickly enough,” said Mark Wakefield, a managing director at Alix Partners, a consulting firm with a large automotive practice.

The trouble is that while semiautonomous systems like Tesla’s are guiding a car, human drivers can be lulled into feeling they are able to turn their attention away from the road. Mr. Brown, like some other Model S owners, posted videos showing the driver with no hands on the steering wheel. In one video, a driver climbs into the back seat.

Pete Cordaro, the owner of a vending machine company from Connellsville, Pa., owns a 2013 Model S that does not have Autopilot. But he drove a loaner with the feature earlier this year while his was being repaired. He loves his car and has deposits to buy two Model 3 compacts when that car is available, yet he is “on the fence” about getting Autopilot.

While the technology “was the greatest thing” on closed highways like the Pennsylvania Turnpike, it could become confused in more complicated environments like construction zones, Mr. Cordaro said.

“My experience is it’s really not completely safe except in limited-access highways,” he said. “It gives you a false sense of security. You get comfortable and think you can take your hands off the wheel but you really can’t. It should be called Auto-assist, instead of Autopilot, because that’s all it is.”

Even Amnon Shashua, an executive whose technology is part of Tesla’s self-driving feature, said on Friday that he did not think self-driving’s time had yet come.

Mr. Shashua is co-founder and chairman of Mobileye, an Israeli company that makes camera and sensing technology. According to the Tesla website, Tesla uses Mobileye components but developed the self-driving system in the Model S itself.

Mobileye, along with the chip maker Intel, is at work in a partnership with BMW on the self-driving car that the German automaker described in Munich on Friday that is supposed to be available in 2021.

Mr. Shashua suggested that self-driving technology was close, but still not quite ready for actual use without human drivers remaining engaged.

“Five years is a very short time,” Mr. Shashua said. “On the other hand, it is a sufficient time to do the types of validations that are needed.”

The BMW car Mobileye is collaborating on will be capable of piloting itself on highways, but not necessarily in complex urban settings.

Automakers and technology companies still need to do “hundreds of thousands or millions of kilometers of validation and simulations” in closed testing environments to be certain the technology is safe, Mr. Shashua said.

“I think it is very important, especially given this accident and what we hear in the news, that companies are very transparent about the limitations of the system,” he said.

Although Tesla has publicly said that it has enhanced the Mobileye technology, the company has not commented on whether it has enhanced the system to protect against what the industry describes as “lateral turn across path”— the type of situation in the Florida accident.

Others in the automotive industry are working on sensor technologies meant to detect vehicles from all angles.

One approach is lidar — a system that uses rotating laser beams. Lidar is being used in the experimental autonomous vehicle being developed by BMW, as well as those by Google, Nissan and Apple. But it remains unclear whether the laser system will come down enough in price to use in mass-market cars.

Jack Ewing contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on July 2, 2016, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Technology Surges, but Human Behavior Is Being Tested, Too.

The Fully Self-Driving Car Is Still Years Away,
NYT,
July 1, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/02/
business/international/bmw-tesla-self-driving-car-mobileye-intel.html

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