Why do we keep referring to something that we understand should require human supervision as "auto"? Stop the marketing buzzfeed and let's be real.
is there any point in saying that a hypothetical brain-dead, comatose bodybuilder is stronger than a starving man?
That would be great to live in the world of marketing people where everyone is so able to parse weasel words. That would solve the fake news problem overnight.
The point being that in the future the car _could_ get "full self-driving capability" via a software update. In contrast, a car that doesn't have the necessary hardware will never be fully self-driving even if we do develop the necessary software to accomplish that in the future.
Misleading examples of the genre:
My cell phone has the right hardware to cure cancer! I just don't have the right app.
The dumbest student in my class has a good enough brain to verify the Higgs-Boson particle. He just doesn't know how.
This mill and pile of steel can make the safest bridge in the world. It just hasn't been designed yet.
Your shopping cart full of food could be used to make a healthy, delicious meal. All you need is a recipe that no one knows.
Baby, I can satisfy your needs up and down as well as any other person. I just have to... well... learn how to satisfy your needs!
If we were well on the way to completing a cure for cancer that uses a certain type of cell phone hardware, maybe that first statement wouldn't sound so ridiculous.
a. When you buy a car why should you even care about that hw/sw distinction, and more importantly do you have the distinction in mind at all time, and are advertisement usually worded that way, stating that maybe the car could become self-driving one day (but without even stating the maybe explicitly, just using tricks)
b. It is extremely dubious that the car even have the necessary hardware to become a fully autonomous driving car. We will see, but I don't believe it much, and more importantly competitors and people familiar with the field also don't believe it much...
People clearly are misunderstanding what Tesla Autopilot is, but this is not, ultimately, their fault. This is Tesla's fault. The people operating the car can NOT be considered as perfect flawless robot. Yet Tesla's model consider them like that, and reject all responsibility, not even considering the responsibility that they made a terrible mistake in considering them like that. We need to act the same way as when similar cases happens for a pilot mistake in an Airplane: change the system so that the human will make less mistakes (especially if the human is required for safe operation, which is the case here). But Tesla is doing the complete opposite! By misleading buyers and drivers in the first place.
Tesla should be forced by the regulators to stop their shit: stop misleading and dangerous advertisement; stop their autosteer uncontrolled experiment.
I think I actually sort of disagree with your reasoning in precisely the opposite direction. Specifically, you state the following: "The people operating the car can NOT be considered as perfect flawless robot.".
I agree with that statement 100%. People are not perfect robots with perfect driving skills. Far from it. Automotive accidents are a major cause of death in the United States.
What I disagree with is your takeaway. Your takeaway is that Tesla knows that people aren't perfect drivers, so it is irresponsible to sell people a a device with a feature (autopilot) that people will use incorrectly. Well, if that isn't the definition of a car, I don't know what is. Cars in and of themselves are dangerous and it takes perhaps 5 minutes of city driving to see someone doing something irresponsible with their vehicle. This is why driving and the automotive industry is so heavily (and rightly) regulated.
The knowledge that people are not save drivers, to me, is a strong argument in favor of autopilot and similar features. I suspect, as many people do, that autopilot doesn't compare favorably to a professional driver who is actively engaged in the activity of driving. But this isn't how people drive. To me, the best argument in favor of autopilot is - and I realize this sounds sort of bad - that as imperfect as it may be, its use need only result in fewer accidents, injuries, and deaths, than the human drivers who are otherwise driving unassisted.
And if by some chance it turns out that more hardware was required after all they'll try to shoehorn the functionality into the available package. If only to save some $ but also not to look bad from a PR point of view. That that compromises safety is a given, you can't know today what exactly it will take to produce this feature until you've done so and there is a fair chance that it will in fact require more sensors, a faster CPU, more memory or a special purpose co-processor.
But that's not going to happen, because Tesla wants to deceive some people into believing that autopilot is "full self driving" so they will buy the car.