Comment by Theodores | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Theodores | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I know that the name is a good one, but 'Autopilot' is a troublesome name.

I think a better way forward would be to do something fun with the 'Autopilot' name, e.g.:

"Zanzibar (formerly known as Autopilot)"

Nobody need know what "Zanzibar" actually is other than some place a long way from California. You could easily talk about your Tesla to a non-owner saying 'yeah, it's got Zanzibar...' or to a fellow owner 'did you spec the Zanzibar level 5 option?'

I picked the name 'Zanzibar' randomly here, it could be any place rather than any thing. If Autopilot was rebranded as 'celery' then someone would expect that in the glovebox. A brand name that means nothing and can be nebulous would be best.

GM has the right name with Super Cruise. It works just as well and in some cases better than Tesla Autopilot, but the perception of the public is that it's worse because it doesn't have the inflated name of 'Autopilot'.

* now that I look at it again, it is actually more 'auto' than autopilot since they do not require your hands to be on the wheel but they do track your eyes for attention to the road.

I mean that's a perfect choice as long as your marketing strategy isn't to hope that people pay extra for the feature thinking that it's FSD. The fact that Tesla still hasn't done something like this is proof that they're kind of relying on people to think that autopilot is something that automatically pilots the vehicle, which it doesn't.

I'm confused why there is such a dissonance on the definition of "autopilot." Most people are fully aware that commercial planes have at least one human pilot in addition to an "autopilot," and I think the passengers on the plane would be very unwilling to fly if the human pilots weren't present. "chauffeur" seems like it would be misleading for partial self-driving software, but "autopilot" seems spot on: helpful, but not good enough to replace the human.

Yes but it is a battle they have lost. Sometimes common sense does not prevail. Particularly in the media.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com