Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see the use of “autopilot” name bring brought up a lot. Thinking about what an autopilot in an airplane does, labeling Tesla’s system autopilot is actually pretty apt. It’s unfortunate that there’s a disconnect between what autopilot means colloquially vs what it actually does on a plane.
> what an autopilot in an airplane does ...Flies the plane safely with zero input from the pilot (hands off the yoke) indefinitely? Lands the plane on its own [1]? I'm well aware that autopilot systems need input directions for desired altitude and air speed, but the semantic distinction people try to draw between "real" autopilot and Tesla's autopilot capabilities have never made sense to me. [1] https://en.wikipedi…
Typical airliner autopilot flies along a list of 3D waypoints and manages airspeed to avoid falling from the sky or overstressing the airframe. It's a fairly trivial system since it does not have to find its way around a complex, constantly changing environment like a car does. It will happily fly into mountains, other airplanes or dangerous environments like thunderstorms.
All decision-making depends on pilots. Autopilot itself is nothing more than a simple cruise control that relieves pilots from things like manually maintaining constant altitude over six hours on a transatlantic flight. Any hobbist with a Raspberry PI can built a similar GPS-based waypoint following and speed scheduling for a car, but it's useless for road traffic, because roads are not straight, long empty stretches that can be navigated by driving from one waypoint directly to another waypoint 100 miles away.
Car autopilot must be able to make decisions (follow the road, react to obstacles) to be useful, and that makes it fundamentally more complex than any existing airliner autopilot.