You're right, Tesla mistakenly believed they could cash in on calling their system Autopilot™ and somehow sidestep the connotations with the name and the damage pushing a broken implementation on consumers is causing.

The unfortunate truth is, if I gave my mom a car with the autopilot feature, she'd end up eventually trusting it and not care about the implementation details that make Tesla's system not an automated driving feature. That's scary and dangerous to market to consumers.