If it would be any other car manufacturer they would be facing multi-million lawsuits. Instead TSLA is breaking records.
Oh, and anyone who paid extra for these features should be given a refund, as those features were falsely advertised.
IMO there are some features that shouldn't exist until full L4 so that people aren't tempted to let the car do the driving when it can't
They walked back, or qualified a lot of the initial claims and added mitigations to prevent their 'self-driving' systems from being used as such.
>Oh, and anyone who paid extra for these features should be given a refund, as those features were falsely advertised.
There may be some validity to this. Musk/Tesla certainly made explicit claims that existing cars have the hardware to achieve full autonomous driving via a future software patch.
The product names are fraudulent, there's no walking back when they're still called Autopilot (a term which in all other uses essentially does not require operator attention) and Full Self-Driving (which is definitely not what the feature is).
It's fraud, plain and simple. Until the features are renamed, Tesla continues to commit fraud.
Autopilots don't stop crashes, or change lanes. So Tesla's Navigate on Autopilot already does more than a standard Autopilot
Most laypeople who encounter autopilot do so on small sailboats near the coastline where a collision is extremely likely if you just turn on the autopilot and go chill in the cabin.
That's for courts to decide, but I don't think so, at least not to the level of hostility that you seem to hold.
This kind of reasoning is typical online where deductive logic based on strong assumptions made by the posters, is then used to reach equally strong conclusion (in this case, that a marketing term implies outright fraud). The reality is that regulatory, judicial and cultural boundaries have much more slack than you give them credit for. And that's a good thing.
If that is the general perception, how it got that way doesn't change what people think the word means, or what they'll hear when Tesla names a feature Autopilot.
Of course people recognize that they can get around Tesla's precautions and have nobody in the driver's seat, just like pilots could all leave the cockpit while the 737 is in flight and go get wasted at the minibar or whatever. But they don't and neither should drivers, and Tesla isn't suggesting that driver's should – in fact they've put technological precautions in place that airplanes with autopilot don't even use to ensure someone is at the stick.
You can also run over pedestrians with [insert car here], but nobody is suggesting you do it. People doing it anyway is not [insert car manufacturer here]'s fault.
I'm not saying "people think Tesla wants you to defeat their safety mechanisms and sit in the back seat."
I'm saying "The name implies more autonomy to the average person than the system actually has."
I could be wrong - I certainly don't have statistics to back up my perception of laypeople's usage of the word "autopilot."
It still seems to me like for the average buyer the name is misleading, though.
If tomorrow Boeing came out and said "hey, Autopilot on the 787 Dreamliner is sophisticated to the point where the plane can totally fly itself, from takeoff to landing", would it be reasonable for all 787 Dreamliner pilots to just leave the cockpit and get wasted with the flight attendants in the back? I don't think so. So I don't understand why people are holding Tesla to a ridiculous standard that they're not holding any other company to. Teslas can drive themselves from A to B in many situations at this point. It's not false advertising to say that. What would not be OK is if Tesla was saying if you buy this car you don't need to be in the driver's seat right now (not in the future, which is how they're currently selling it).
My point is: I don't think this is true. But if you have a survey which indicates that a broad swath of the population believes Teslas with Autopilot don't need any human intervention or shouldn't have someone in the driver's seat I'd love to see it.
Literally dozens of people in this thread are saying "this is what the average person believes" when none of them believe it themselves. Where are ya'll getting this insight into the average person's thought processes?
Most people hear "autopilot" and think "set it and forget it".