Exactly where Tesla’s marketing failed. It irritates me as a pilot that they have given it a new definition.
Autopilots have been around a long time, and have a very specific meaning. They require training, knowing what their limitations are, constant monitoring, and frequent manual input.
I’m not sure what Tesla thought they were doing by billing it as a “hands off” term.
As much as I dislike Musk and the mess Tesla has created with "Full self-driving", I don't think you can blame Tesla marketing for the public misconception of what an aircraft autopilot does.
Because, the Tesla autopilot feature is actually rather similar to a simple aircraft autopilot, with very similar limitations. At its core, it's really just a lane following driver assist, combined with adaptive cruise control. If you ignore the "adaptive" part, it's roughly equivalent to an aircraft autopilot in heading mode, plus autothrottle.
Tesla marketing did lean into that misconception, benefited from it and might have made it worse. But they didn't create it, and the public misconception predates Tesla by a long margin... it just didn't really matter before then.
From what I can tell, the misconception arises from the fact that the public know flying an aircraft is hard, the fact that pilots do so much training proves that. Therefore, they assume an aircraft autopilot must be advanced to handle the perceived complexity of keeping an aircraft stable in the air.
The introduction of autoland, and the way it was presented in magazine articles by journalists, probably made the problem much worse.
Autopilots have been around a long time, and have a very specific meaning. They require training, knowing what their limitations are, constant monitoring, and frequent manual input.
I’m not sure what Tesla thought they were doing by billing it as a “hands off” term.