I find the implication highly questionable that naming this feature something else would have prevented this boneheaded incident. Stupid people do equally reckless things in their normal cars every day. As Musk says, experienced Tesla drivers know the limitations of the system and just get complacent. Or for all we know these people were just suicidal.
There's been aggressive self-driving promotion for Tesla cars from the company and the naming of the 'autopilot' feature is just a small part of this. I don't know if this specific accident happened in a way that related to this, but I think it's likely that the general way that Musk and Tesla talk about their cars has led to accidents where people trust autopilot more than they should, or are trying to show off how great their car is because they think it can do more than it can.
