Drive Pilot. Autopilot. Pilot Assist. Super Cruise.
Cool names, but what do they mean?
All of these branded systems provide varying degrees of driver assistance that offer a glimpse into a future of self-driving cars, but none of them are fully autonomous.
Shoppers might never know that if they searched for these brand names on YouTube and came upon all the videos of carefree drivers taking their hands off the steering wheels during demonstrations, in defiance of the lawyer-approved warnings in the instruction manuals. Only Cadillac's Super Cruise is designed to be a hands-free system in limited circumstances.
And so while marketers can't control what the public does, they must still account for, and contend with, the misconceptions being created at viral speed.