I'm not endorsing Tesla or their tech, and I stand behind what I wrote as demonstrating the alternative to taking "Autopilot" as a metaphor - taking it literally. If you don't like either one, what's your justification for interpreting Autopilot in a particular way?

I think the important questions are how people actually interpret it, and (if we want to judge Tesla) how they could reasonably have expected people to interpret it.

I don't know exactly how they presented it to the public, but it definitely doesn't seem like a name you'd choose if you were keen to avoid having people overestimate its capabilities.

I think it's insane to identify the problem as being the name, rather than that using the technology inherently leads to a dangerous sense of confidence (assuming it doesn't in fact scare you out of continuing). As many people have said, the fundamental issue is the tiny amount of time between appropriate operation and disaster, and the better it works at first, the less prepared a person is when it goes haywire. This is the same no matter what you call it.

Yeah I agree that that is a bigger problem. (And not just confidence, but concentration -- even if you know you can't trust the car, it must be a lot harder to stay properly alert when you have nothing to do 99% of the time.) I didn't mean to agree with anyone who thinks that the name is the problem, but I think it could plausibly make things worse by contributing to unrealistic expectations and gung-ho attitudes. It could also give us a clue about Tesla's attitude, and how they are balancing hyping the feature vs. trying to prevent driver complacency.