I continually saw reference in this thread to what it says on the Tesla Design page about AP controlling from ramp on to ramp off. All makers of every product sell what it can do. XYZ airlines can fly you from JFK to LAX in 4 hours. They won't mention that if the weather goes to pot, you may have to spend the night in Cleveland. Satellite TV can give you 300 channels, but not if it is raining really hard. (And only 250 of them are shopping channels!) They don't list all the situations when it may not do what it can do. Unless you are talking medicines. Then they go through all the ways it will kill you in order to get rid of your toenail fungus so fast that you just tune it out. From what I have seen, Tesla's claims for the autopilot are accurate. It will do what it says. It will keep me in my lane and control my speed from ramp on till ramp off. Does it always do it faultlessly? No. And to show the sales page instead of the readily available owner's manual which clearly lists the cautions is a bit misleading.
One of the problems here is that people come up with their own idea of what an Autopilot is, and what it can do. I don't know where people get these ideas. Movies? TV? It doesn't matter, except that what they think autopilots are and what they do is often inaccurate. Most of these people have never used an autopilot before. They think pilots just push buttons and sit on their hands. Overpaid computer operators. For over 40 years, I have flown the most sophisticated autopilots in the world. I have seen tremendous strides in this technology. Some can land an aircraft weighing many hundreds of thousands of pounds on a runway without the pilot ever seeing anything until the nose wheel lowers, allowing him to see over the nose to the runway below. (This is important, because the autopilot cannot taxi to the gate.) And in severe situations, there isn't much for him to see, even then.
I admit that when at altitude, pilots do not have to keep their hands on the controls. But we have ATC keeping traffic separation standards. And in that arena, all the other aircraft are flown by well trained professional pilots. But since that can also fail, we have displays showing all aircraft which might conflict within 40 miles of our position. And whenever we have a doubt, the pilots do have their hands on the controls. And that is in the most controlled and least congested traffic situation in the world. Contrast that arena to a modern freeway where you are operating within just a few feet of other vehicles of questionable roadworthiness which may be driven by inexperienced text addicted teens, or worse, drivers affected by alcohol or drugs.
And when flying those low visibility approaches I mentioned earlier, or indeed, any autopilot approaches, guess what the pilots are taught to do. KEEP YOUR HANDS ON THE CONTROL WHEEL AND THROTTLES in the event of a malfunction. No airliners have a totally autonomous autopilot, as some people here seem to think . Today's modern aircraft have excellent autopilots which can do amazing things. They have triple redundancy and crosschecks. But the final and most important element is a trained pilot with his hands on the controls. Because anything can happen, at any time.
I doubt that in my lifetime, we will see what some of the Tesla owners thought an autopilot to be. There are simply too many things, moving in unpredictable ways, only feet away from you for the system to account for. So for the foreseeable future, I expect us to have to be ready to take over, just like the pilots of the world's most sophisticated airplanes. Perhaps some day, when all cars are autopilot cars. But I'm not holding my breath.
If you want to wait till autopilots are totally autonomous, I hope you are very, very young.
