But to claim that autopilot shut itself off before impact means that the Tesla detected the wall and decided impact was imminent, which disproves his point.

Completely disagree. You are assuming the same sensors that handle autopilot are the same sensors that disengage it when detecting close proximity. The fact that it happened the instant before he connected kind of shows that at a very close distance something is detecting an impact and cutting it off. If it knew ahead of time it would have stopped well ahead of time.

The original goal also wasn’t to uncover this, it was just to compare it to lidar per the article. I’m guessing we’re going to see a ton more things pop up testing this claim, and we’re likely to see tesla push an OTA update that changes the behavior so that people can’t easily reproduce it.

Of course it disengages self driving modes before an impact. Why would they want to be liable for absolutely anything?