FSD’s Day in Court
Tesla recently made arguments against the California Department of Motor Vehicles, and their claim that the EV company had engaged in false advertising regarding its “Autopilot” and “Full Self Driving” software.
The filing made on December 8th was the latest in a legal back-and-forth between Tesla and the DMV going back to August 2022, when the California regulator officially opened the case.
The original argument was that the claims by Tesla that their software was an “Autopilot” of any sort was misleading, and dangerous - something that could lead drivers to pay less attention while the software was activated, and would lead to more accidents.
And to be fair, about two months before this case was made, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had published their numbers for crashes involving driver-assistance systems in the past year - and Tesla vehicles made up 70 percent of all incidents during that time - 273 reported crashes involving the company’s self-driving systems.
Now, as Tesla vehicles are by far the most popular electric vehicles on the road, it makes a lot of sense that they’d make up such a large percentage of these sorts of accidents - but the DMV is a regulatory body, and so they couldn’t just ignore these numbers. So, what do they want Tesla to do here?
The case states that the DMV wants Tesla to actually advertise their autonomous driving software - which is clever of them. Tesla famously does not advertise, and so a lot of these false advertising claims are in a bit of a grey area - whether or not Elon makes wild claims on the internet.
But by forcing Tesla to advertise, it would also force them to add very visible disclaimers, and to have some extra responsibility for what happens when drivers use their FSD software.
Now, this is obviously not what Tesla wants - but it’s also a bit redundant. Watch any focused conversation from Tesla personnel about FSD and they’ll mention that this is a Beta software that is in development, and that a driver should ALWAYS be ready to take control of the vehicle. Tesla buyers have also noted that when purchasing FSD, there are disclaimers everywhere about the need to keep control of the vehicle - in both the purchase contract and in the owner’s manual.
The only good argument the DMV seems to have here is that most drivers don’t bother reading fine print, and so going on just what Elon says, drivers could get the wrong impression about the system’s capabilities.
So what are Tesla’s arguments, then?
Well, aside from the clear disclaimers in their manuals, the recent filing argues two things. First being that the DMV has already allowed Tesla to use the term “autopilot” based on an investigation completed in 2014. Second, the “self-driving” terminology was not disallowed in the passing of fresh legislation completed by the DMV in 2016.
So, basically, the DMV gave permission to Tesla to use both terms, on two separate occasions. It doesn’t matter very much if the DMV is claiming that Elon’s claims about the software contradict the disclaimers in the company’s manuals - they approved the use of both terms themselves a decade ago when Tesla started using them!
It’s pretty likely that Tesla is going to win this case, and with the DMV being this sloppy it’s hard to blame anything else. There’s an argument to be made about increasing driver education around self-driving programs - but if it is Tesla’s responsibility to do that, the DMV sure isn’t making a convincing case here.