Mercedes becomes the first automaker to sell autonomous cars in the U.S. that don't come with a requirement that drivers watch the road

Tesla can barely manage a working L2 system.

This system operates completely differently than Tesla and will be accordingly limited. Tesla is designing their system to be able to drive anywhere, not just select roads in limited conditions.

You’re getting this wrong. Tesla is simply lying to customers and risks their life to sell them an unproven system which at this point is known to have killed people. I bet Mercedes implementation is way better (probably because radar and lidar) but they still do not gamble your life on barely maturing technology just to sell more cars. By limiting the system they know what the risks are and are relatively certain about its performance. In other words they’ve done the testing, so you with your passengers don’t have to.