Tesla keeps calling it "Full Self-Driving," and that phrase has done more damage to American road safety than any single piece of marketing in recent memory.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened investigations into the system's behavior, and the pattern in the data is hard to dismiss: drivers who trusted a product name got warnings, crashes, and in some cases, funerals.
It's a story about what we're willing to believe when a screen tells us we can relax.
Here is the part that should unsettle anyone who shares a road with these cars.
Autopilot and its so-called Full Self-Driving upgrade are not autonomous.
They are driver-assistance features that require a human to stay alert and ready to take over at any moment.
Yet the name, the dashboard graphics, and years of CEO bravado have trained a chunk of owners to treat the driver's seat like a passenger seat.
That gap between what a system can do and what its branding implies is where people get hurt.
We have spent a decade teaching Americans that technology removes responsibility.
Your streaming service predicts your taste.
So when a car says it can drive itself, a reasonable person wonders why they'd bother watching the road.
Automakers exploit that instinct, then quietly bury the disclaimer in a manual nobody reads.
It's a business model built on human trust we haven't earned and can't afford to waste.
And the casualties aren't confined to Tesla owners.
Every driver, cyclist, and pedestrian in America now shares space with vehicles whose software is learning in public, on real streets, at real speeds.
When a system fails, the consequences land on whoever happens to be nearby.
That's the quiet social cost of shipping half-finished autonomy to millions of customers and calling it progress.
What makes this so frustrating is that the technology isn't worthless.
Adaptive cruise control and lane-keeping assist genuinely reduce fatigue on long highway drives.
When companies inflate what a tool can do, they don't just sell a feature.
They sell a false sense of safety, and false safety is more dangerous than no safety at all, because it breeds the exact inattention that causes crashes.
Regulators are catching up slowly, with inquiries, reporting requirements, and the occasional forced software update.
But rules move at the speed of government, and software ships at the speed of a download.
That mismatch leaves the public serving as the test track.
Until the names match the reality and the marketing matches the machine, every one of us is enrolled in an experiment we never consented to join.
My take: call the feature what it is, hold the promises to the same standard as the product, and stop letting clever branding paper over a safety question that belongs to all of us.
Final Thoughts
Trust on the road is a shared resource, and we're burning through it fast.