The Professionals® that actually use a real autopilot tell us that Tesla's is aptly named-- it's limited in its functionality and is designed to assist the operator of the machinery and to reduce fatigue.

The Problem® is one of public perception/branding. Hollywood has convinced the overwhelming preponderance of the population that airplanes on autopilot can taxi away from the terminal, navigate to the runway, avoid collisions with buildings, vehicles and other planes, line up on the runway, take off, navigate to the destination, line up with the correct runway from the correct direction, land the plane, and taxi to the final terminal.

Naming your not-fully-autonomous car driving software "autopilot" is going to have a perception problem. Educating the public after the fact is a hard battle.

In this case, the popular usage of a term used to describe a feature to the general public is the most pertinent meaning of that term.

"We're using industry jargon rather than the popular meaning" just doesn't cut it when your audience is the populace, not industry. This is not Hollywood's fault, it's Tesla's.

Read the post-mortem of the Air France flight from Brazil to Paris. The pilots did not even know the basic error recovery conditions of flying the plane they were in (recognizing dual input, recognizing a stall) because they so rarely flew the plane. Auto pilot can handle navigation to destination, lining up with the runway after being given the approach vectors by the pilot that he/she received from ATC.

If auto pilot in Tesla were used like auto pilots in modern commercial air travel, it would cover 95% of the operation time of the cars.

One pilot, singular, did not know how to recover. The other two did. The one who was at the controls attempted to perform a correct recovery. He was thwarted by the unbelievably idiotic design of the Airbus control system, in which conflicting inputs are simply averaged, and the only indication that something strange is happening is a warning light.

Edit: regarding the pilot who did the wrong thing, I don't think it's fair to say that he didn't know how to recover, either. He almost certainly knew how to recognize and recover from a stall. He was a glider pilot, where stalls are a matter of course. It seems that he panicked, which prevented him from thinking clearly and taking the proper actions. People do that sometimes, and a big reason you have two pilots is so the other one can step in when one of them gets stupid. The fatal flaw with the Airbus was the system which failed to adequately inform the other pilot of the first pilot's stupid actions. (In any sensibly designed aircraft, the two sets of controls will move together, providing physical feedback of each pilot's inputs to the other pilot.)

>and the only indication that something strange is happening is a warning light.

In addition to the warning light there is an audio warning "DUAL INPUT" and tactile feedback (stick vibration). The fact that the pilots did not recognize this condition feeds into my point about them not flying the plane nearly often enough to actually understand how it behaves in anything other than an ideal condition.

Auto-pilot => autonomous piloting.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/autonomous

3. Existing or capable of existing independently. But no its totes a public perception problem.

Are you implying that the aviation industry has been using this term incorrectly for a century and counting, and that we should believe a layman's dictionary over actual common usage?

Yes. Cars aren't sold to people in the aviation industry, they're sold to laymen.

Since actual real-life autopilots nearly universally don't act that way, does that not mean it's a perception problem?

If people are dying, then it's a people dying problem. If the number of people who die depends on what name Tesla chose for the feature, then Tesla is at least in part responsible for the people dying problem.

If I'm a bartender, and I tell a customer "this is a strong pour - it's literally cyanide!", and the customer drinks it, there is not a "he should have known the right definition of literally" defense.

So far it seems to be safer, not more dangerous, than regular driving.

I would argue that we do not have conclusive data. If Joshua Brown had his wife and kids with him in the car the simple math everyone is doing (fatalities / miles driven) would not look so good for autopilot. It's going to take a lot of miles before we know for sure. Probably 100x what they have so far.

In an abstract academic sense, maybe. The fact is, that's what the vast majority of people think autopilots do. You can either spend billions on ad campaigns and such and still probably only reach 10% of the market over the course of a few years, or you can just call the feature something else.