By naming the system autopilot, Tesla has also created that same expectation with their customers. Not only that, but it has at best turned a blind eye to reports and videos and stories of customers who willfully take their hands of the wheel/sit in the back seat/etc. and at worst encouraged an erroneous public perception of how the autopilot system should be used.

The issues you cited in handoffs with airplanes are far more complicated when it comes to cars, where decisions need necessarily to be taken in a much shorter period of time. But all of that seems really downplayed by Tesla marketing, which instead chooses to aggressively market just how close the system is to full driving autonomy, instead of more like a gentle aid to monotonous highway driving.

The disconnect between their official documentation and their marketing is immense. That is what is potentially dangerous.

Any vehicular autopilot will need to reliably and consistently take care of collision avoidance. Any autopilot which wants to deem itself better than humans needs to do so much better than the equivalent human (and in a multitude of conditions, such as rain, snow, gravel, idiot drivers...).

And this doesn't even consider handover times. An aircraft autopilot could fail completely, and the pilot would still have on the order of minutes to recover (assuming this occurs mid-flight, at cruising altitude). A car autopilot failure would give seconds, in the best case.

What do you mean by this? There are many autopilots which won't take over all flight operations. Some only handle a single control axis, or two. More sophisticated ones can indeed handle everything, but that's not the only kind out there.

If people think that's what all autopilots do, then the name is still a problem, but that's a bit different.

And that's a very useful and safe way to get a plane from A to B, given the amount of route planning and air traffic control in modern aviation. An autopilot can generally provide ample warning of situations it can't handle, and a plane at cruise altitude has quite a bit of room for recoverable error.

Until we have traffic control on our highways that makes sure our cars know about obstacles early enough, the same basic features are not enough to provide the same experience for a car.

So, can we rely on it to make the right decision in a safety-critical situation, or not? (The answer to this question seems to be 'yes, until there's an accident.')

[1] https://electrek.co/2016/07/05/elon-musk-tesla-autopilot-sav...

All shiny and glittery world: "Press a button, walk inside, while car is putting itself away for you!" "Press a button as you walk out the front door and the car will pull up in front of you!" "Half a million lives could be saved by using our ever-so-safe autopilot system!"

Cold reality, faced with liability and lawsuits: "Your fault. You didn't stand there and supervise the whole process!" "Your fault, it's not an autopilot that lets you not be in control of the vehicle, despite allowing you to go up to 15 minutes without touching the steering wheel" "Your fault, you hit the brakes with insufficient time to stop the vehicle before a collision. The vehicle wasn't under autopilot control at the time of the collision, so it doesn't count. The fact that you only hit the brakes because the vehicle was about to happily collide at speed is ... entirely ... separate, and unrelated!"

The issue supposedly is that people have no idea about this, though, and think (because of movies?) that "autopilot" means it does everything. I'm still not sure if I believe it, but if so it has nothing to do with real autopilots.

Tesla's marketing many people know this is what people think of too, as the general population is never well versed in any area of speciality, by definition.

Calling it autopilot is misleading. Cars aren't aircraft and drivers aren't pilots.

In a car however with the current state of automotive assisantance systems the timeframe for "doing other stuff" is less than 1 second because we have a fast varying environment there, including other cars (or pedestrians, bicycles, ...) taking sudden movements. Even many 5s situations can not be handled by todays assistance systems, like some surface conditions, traffic lights, track changes due to constructions, etc. Which in the end means you have to be constantly be in control of car, which is just not what "automatic" suggests.