I'd say the marketing has been perfect, the haze confuses both the consumers and regulators believe whatever they want to believe.

Other than the latest, bleeding edge beta ("FSD Beta") FSD is vaporware.

Autopilot on the other hand is a pretty good driver assist (lane keeping, TACC, etc.).

From one of the previous threads on FSD

> Tesla has so many versions of "FSD" or Full Self Driving because they keep shifting the post for what exactly is Full Self Driving.

> What even is FSD compared to SD, where did the need to tack on "Full" come from? And I bet it's because of them calling their lane assist cruise "Autopilot" which implies self driving.

This is just a semantic argument about what "capability" and "autonomous" means. The system is obviously capable of autonomously navigating in an engineering sense, because that's what it does.

The system as deployed ("FSD beta") also requires a human driver, and actively monitors for driver attention. So it is not actually operating autonomously.

It seems that the spirit of the law is to disallow unregulated testing of cars that are actually operating autonomously. Cars with a human in the loop don't really seem to be what the regulations were thinking of.

The letter-of-the-law argument would seem to disallow any sort of uncommanded control by the vehicle, including lane assist and 1970's cruise control. And that's not right either.