Another federal investigation into Tesla's driver-assistance software landed this month, and the responses split along the usual lines.
Owners defended the technology they paid thousands for.
Safety advocates pointed to the crash reports.
Meanwhile, the cars kept selling, and the software kept updating over the air like a phone app.
That last detail is the one that should bother people.
We have quietly accepted that a two-ton vehicle's safety-critical behavior can change overnight, without a recall notice taped to the windshield, without a trip to a dealer, without anyone asking the driver's permission.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been probing Autopilot-related crashes for years, and the pattern in the data is consistent: drivers over-trusting a system whose name promises more than it delivers.
Tesla's own manuals say the driver must stay engaged, hands ready, eyes up.
The gap between those two messages is where people die.
This is not really a Tesla story anymore.
The same over-the-air pipeline that pushes a new lane-assist tweak also quietly reshapes what your car does at 70 mph on I-95 while you're reaching for coffee.
You agreed to the terms once, at purchase, on a screen, probably in a hurry.
The deeper ethical problem is that we've outsourced judgment to a subscription.
Full Self-Driving costs thousands upfront or a monthly fee, and the pitch is always the same: it's getting better.
Better than a human who is distracted, tired, and running late?
That's a low bar, and it's the bar the industry keeps clearing while calling it progress.
If Tesla can ship unfinished autonomy to millions of cars and let the public beta-test it on real roads, the incentive for everyone else is obvious.
Ford, GM, and the rest have already pulled back on hands-free promises after their own scares.
Restraint, it turns out, is a marketing disadvantage.
What's missing is a shared standard for what "self-driving" is even allowed to mean in advertising.
Right now a name does the legal work that a warning label should.
Call it Autopilot and buyers hear "airplane." Call it Full Self-Driving and they hear "done." Neither word is true, and both are legal.
The uncomfortable truth is that the fix isn't purely technical.
Americans love the idea of the car that drives itself because we hate the commute, and we've decided that convenience is worth a certain number of funerals.
We just haven't been honest about the number.
So the next time a software update notification pops up on your dash, read it like it matters.
Our take: the technology may eventually be safer than us, but the marketing has outrun the engineering by a decade, and drivers are paying the difference in attention they don't have.
Final Thoughts
Until the words on the screen match the physics on the road, every "autopilot" is a promise being tested on public streets.