Tesla has had it both ways for ages - their stock price was based on "self-driving cars" and their liability was based on "asterisk asterisk the car cannot drive itself".
For an IFR checkride, if you do it in an aircraft equipped with autopilot, at least one approach will have to be flown with the autopilot.
Not sure if that’s made it’s way to the PPL checkride (or been codified) but it’s inevitable.
There's also a (stupid, imo) tendency for APs to conveniently become inop right before a checkride. It's not accurate to say that all pilots, or even all pilots that have taken an IR ride, are "pilots who understand the capabilities and limits of aviation autopilot technology."
But yes, I understand what you mean.
In the fleet at the school I was learning in (Cessna 162) only one plane had an autopilot, which meant nobody practiced with it, so they never scheduled this plane for a check ride.
But then again even on HN people like parent think that autopilot is the same as full self driving, when it is and always has been just smarter cruise control. The payout was for autopilot (a feature that most new cars have these days under various names), not full self driving.
That is absolutely not true. A plane on autopilot can land itself except for applying the brakes.
If you are trying to claim that all autopilots come with auto landers, thats absolutely not true. Even most, and again, they are always separate systems even if the auto lander can access the same servos used by the autopilot. Additionally, autolanders, unlike the autopilot, require the runways to support it (well, the ones used on commercial airplanes where it’s used sometimes in low visibility situations).
I really think only a few people on HN don’t get that autopilots are actually very much simple systems that have been around forever and do one thing well (keep the plane going in one direction at a specific altitude and speed).
That is absolutely false.
A 20 year old avionics suite in General Aviation (GTN 450) does much more than maintain altitude, speed & heading - you input a flight plan including an approach, it will fly the flight plan, capture the approach signals (VOR/localiser/whatever - which is far more complex than “keeping course”) all the way down to approach minimums.
It can go down to 200ft for an LPV approach.
Rudimentary 'autopilots' on aircraft have existed for about a century now, and the earlier versions (before transistorization) only controlled heading and attitude (if conditions and other settings allowed it), with little indication of failure.
The average person does know what an autopilot does, they're just wrong.
I think the example you provided supports that.