Well, they do have the hardware, that isn't the issue.

The cars simply lack the software to enable a fully autonomous vehicle. The phrasing indicates that if/when the software becomes available, the car would be theoretically capable of driving itself.

It's just a typical misleading marketing blurb; nothing more.

> Well, they do have the hardware

They don't actually know that they have hardware for full autonomy till they have a fully working hardware/software autonomy system; what they have is hardware that they hope will support full autonomy, and a willingness to present hopes as facts for marketing purposes.

Yes, it is the issue because no one has achieved full self-driving yet so Tesla simply has no idea what hardware may be required to achieve that level of functionality in real-world situations.

But that wasn't the line of argument I was making. The parent commenter said this about people misunderstanding the term "autopilot"

> Just because people don't know the proper term or have an erroneous idea of the term, doesn't mean tesla has to have the burden of people misinterpreting what it says.

Seems like people might be mistaken because the phrase "Full Self-Driving" is literally the first thing on the official Tesla Autopilot page.

In a sense though, without the software the hardware isn't self-driving, at least enough to be misleading. If you saw "Full Voice-Recognition Hardware on All Computers", you would expect it to actually recognise voices, not just come with a microphone.