Elon Musk’s ‘self-driving’ delusions get a reality check

The electric carmaker says its ‘Full Self-Driving’ claims aren’t misleading. The law takes a different view.

[Source Photo: Matteo Della Torre/NurPhoto/Getty Images]

Two months ago, a state administrative judge in California determined that Tesla broke the law by misleading consumers. The argument: Tesla led them to believe that its cars had real self-driving capabilities, calling them “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving” (commonly known as FSD). The issue is that Teslas can’t really drive by themselves; they still require drivers to remain constantly vigilant to prevent catastrophe. The verdict prompted the California Department of Motor Vehicles to threaten a temporary suspension of Tesla’s manufacturing and sales licenses.

Two months after the ruling, on February 13, Tesla’s attorneys filed a complaint alleging the state “wrongfully and baselessly” labeled it a false advertiser, brazenly arguing that “it was impossible” to buy or use the “auto-pilot” software “without seeing clear and repeated statements that they do not make the vehicle autonomous.” Yet, their fine-print defense clashes with Musk’s failed promises and stunts, such as when he took his hands off the wheel on CBS’s 60 Minutes in 2018 and proudly declared he was “not doing anything.” Or when he showed fake, staged videos of Autopilot in action.

Four days after Tesla’s complaint, California’s DMV backed off its shutdown threats when the company agreed to clean up its marketing, rebranding the $99-a-month subscription to “Full Self-Driving (Supervised)”.

Now CNBC reports that Tesla is suing anyway to completely reverse the ruling. Musk is demanding the right to use his futuristic language to sell cars— determined false by the courts—while simultaneously relying on its owners’ manuals to shift the blame to drivers the second the system fails. The move prompted the DMV to declare it will “defend the Administrative Law Judge’s findings and decision in court” to protect the public.

Tesla’s new legal gambit to defend its autonomous driving fantasy clashes with the brutal reality of a deficient technology. Tesla cars still only have a Level 2 autonomy—a mechanism designed to handle basic steering and speed—out of four levels (the fourth is true full autonomy, which so far only Chinese manufacturer BYD has been able to achieve while parking).

According to the Tesla accident tracking site Tesla Deaths, in the decade after the release of Autopilot in October 2015 there have been at least 65 fatalities connected to Tesla’s Autopilot system. Of those, an April 2024 NHTSA report investigated and verified 29 fatal crashes.

The common thread in these tragedies is a catastrophic failure of the Level 2 advanced driver assistance system to recognize stationary objects or crossing vehicles. In May 2016, Joshua Brown died in Florida when the system failed to notice the white side of an 18-wheeler against a bright sky, leading the National Transportation Safety Board to conclude the software permitted “prolonged disengagement from the driving task.” Incidents continued over the years, culminating in a landmark August 2025 federal jury verdict where Tesla was found 33% liable and ordered to pay $243 million after a 2019 crash in Key Largo, where the driver admitted, “I trusted the technology too much.”

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