A Surface might be an alright option. Last time I checked, the i5 and below models were fanless. With a good case it should be relatively rugged. Linux on Surfaces is fairly decent; I put Zorin on a Surface Go 2, and everything seems to work apart from the IR for face recognition. Battery life has been much better than in Windows, which is a plus.
I think “autopilot” is an accurate name. An aircraft’s autopilot is not designed to allow unsupervised flight. It merely assists with the more “mundane” tasks so the pilot can focus on things that need more active human monitoring. It seems that the type of people to buy these cars for this feature are also the type of people who do not understand what an autopilot is supposed to do. I guess in that sense, I do agree with you.
My thing is that these cars have enough design problems already, and I feel like conflating an autopilot feature with how people are abusing it will pull focus away from the larger issues. Like that horrible manual door release design in another post, and other questionable safety choices.
https://github.com/stivvin/carcinizationpatch