Tesla Must Face False Advertising Claims Around ‘Full Self-Driving’ in California: Report

A complaint that Tesla has misled consumers with the name of its Full Self-Driving (FSD) and Autopilot features, brought by the California Department of Motor Vehicles, will be allowed to go forward, according to a report from Bloomberg Monday.

Tesla had previously defended the use of the term, which is now known as “Full Self-Driving (Supervised),” as a free speech issue. But an administrative judge ruled the complaint from the California DMV could continue on Monday, according to Bloomberg.

The decision comes as Tesla faces federal investigations into FSD technology, which is often blamed when Tesla vehicles are involved in crashes. Officially, Tesla acknowledges that FSD doesn’t allow the average user to ignore the road completely, something that the average person would probably understand as a fully autonomous vehicle.

But CEO Elon Musk has long been predicting that FSD will allow for completely autonomous transportation. And as recently as last week, he touted the latest version by suggesting it may be even more powerful than the name sounds.

“FSD 12.4.1 releases today to Tesla employees,” Musk tweeted on June 5. “If that goes well, then it will be released to a limited number of external customers this weekend. There are a massive number of changes to this build. It should arguably be called v13, but we’re sticking to 12.”

Musk even claimed that soon people will be able to use FSD for as long as a year before a human needs to intervene, though he included a very important caveat.

“Two other versions are in earlier stages of testing: 12.5 and 12.6, which could be called v14 and v15. We are starting to get to the point where, once known bugs are fixed, it will take over a year of driving to get even one intervention,” Musk wrote.

Tesla didn’t immediately respond to questions emailed Monday afternoon. Gizmodo will update this post if we hear back.