but the autopilot makes you nudge the wheel every 30 seconds. if people are really sleeping in their teslas they have added a device to defeat this attention tracking mechanism
yeah this seems to be the most likely scenario. It sounds like the original poster's car was in the middle, tesla was at the end. OP's car suddenly breaks (or hits someone), tesla either does not react fast enough or starts reacting and then the tesla driver hits the gas pedal (meaning to break). Still not sure how they would be able to hit it twice if they hadn't backed up though.
I have a tesla - I could be wrong but I don't think that autopilot has seen any updates in quite some time. The exception to this is people who have the FSD Beta - this is a very small percentage of people who were able to get a impossibly high driving score. Getting into an accident would have made it impossible for this lady to get the FSD Beta
when you turn on autopilot it tells you to keep your hands on the wheel and if it senses you are distracted it will turn it off if you don't wiggle the wheel a little to show you are paying attention. So at least as far as autopilot is concerned I would say the driver is at fault if they run into another car.