Yes, it does seem vague. Isn't the NHTSA investigation meant to be a non-biased root-cause-analysis about last year's trailer crash? Instead, this just seems to be a grading report on Tesla's autopilot compliance.
Section 5.3 pretty much sums up the root cause of this accident: the driver assist requires the driver to be alert, and the driver had 7 seconds to react and didn't.
There's no requirement that driver assist software magically become self-driving software in that situation. Put another way: it's nice if the software can avoid a problem, but not required.
The main remaining concern is that drivers not be confused about what they are required to do; there's discussion about that in this document.
Not really. The NHTSA report says that auto-braking is initiated only when the radar and MobileEye vision systems both report an obstacle. That reflects poor sensor fusion. Tesla took an off the shelf radar product from Bosch and an off the shelf vision product from Mobileye, ANDed their processed outputs together, and called it a day. They don't seem to have confidence data from each sensor and some means to fuse it. If the radar is reporting "target dead ahead, 3 secs to crash" (radars have range rate data), and the vision system is reporting "unrecognized situation ahead", that ought to at least trigger a slowdown and alert.
This is probably why Musk pulled radar and vision processing in-house. Combining the data from both sensors is more effective, but more difficult, than combining the results from processing both sensors separately.
And that's the problem of "aaaalmoooost self-driving cars, just a few corner cases:" 1. the corner cases are right where the risks are, and 2. the hype of "autopiloted" cars creates an unrealistic expectation of L5 autonomy.
