Does everyone else pull over to change the CD or take a sip of water?
I may have worded my reply too strongly, see another comment about "second set of eyes".
But this is dangerous. When I open a bottle in my car, I know that it's a more dangerous situation than usual, I pay more attention, choose the right moment and see that I finish drinking quickly.
A Tesla driver can easily fool himself into "everything's fine, let me sip from the bottle for sevetal minutes and maybe search through my audio CDs".
I got the impression though that OP was stating that they used theirs as a "second pair of eyes" and added safety device when they do things in the car that require their hands and attention. This, to me, is perfectly fine. I know people who get around this in normal cars by driving with the knees, or just taking their eyes off the road for "just a second". Using autopilot has got to be safer than that.
I once had a wasp fly right into my face when I was driving, auto pilot would have been great, luckily I was on an empty road, but if I was unlucky enough to need to react fast as that happened I doubt I would have been able to.
You can't rely on the Autopilot to prevent accidents, it's simply not designed for this. So you have to pay the same amount of attention as if you were driving entirely manually. So if you're doing stuff that would be impossible while driving yourself, you're almost certainly not paying enough attention to the road and are at least negligent. Not sure about US laws, but usually there are laws against driving in a reckless or dangerous fashion, that can catch all kinds of behaviour.
You need to be always focused on the road and ready to take the wheel at any moment -- which in practice means you can't be using it at all, since "at any moment" means that 2-3 seconds can be all it takes between crashing and recovering from an autopilot error.
