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Tesla knew Autopilot caused death, but didn't fix it
(www.theregister.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
"A bit misleading" is, I think, a bit of a misleading way to describe their marketing. It's literally called Autopilot, and their marketing material has very aggressively pitched it as a 'full self driving' feature since the beginning, even without mentioning Musk's own constant and ridiculous hyperbole when advertising it. It's software that should never have been tested outside of vehicles run by company employees under controlled conditions, but Tesla chose to push it to the public as a paid feature and significantly downplay the fact that it is a poorly tested, unreliable beta, specifically to profit from the data generated by its widespread use, not to mention the price they charge for it as if it were a normal, ready to use consumer feature. Everything about their deployment of the system has been reckless, careless, and actively disdainful of their customers' safety.
Everybody who has a bit of an idea what an autopilot in a plane actually does is not mislead. Do people really think that commercial airline pilots just hit the “autopilot” button in their cockpit after disengaging the boarding ramp and then lean back until the boarding ramp at the destination is attached?
So I need to understand the autopilot of a plane first before I buy a car?
I would be mislead then, as I have no idea how such autopilots work. I also suspect that those two systems don't really work the same. One flies, the other drives. One has traffic lights, the other doesn't. One is operated by well paid professionals, the other, well, by me. Call me simple, but there seem to be some major differences.
I would have though people would read autopilot and think automatic. At least that's what I do. I guess pilot is closely associated with planes but it certainly isn't what I think of.