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It should be illegal for them to call it full self drive. It's 100% false advertising not to mention the 'danger' that people will assume it is what it says it is.

It probably is illegal...

... and the fines have been factored into the bottom line.

It might be legal, but in court what you advertise the car can do generally has high weight than what you put in the warning documentation. Thus Tesla is stupid for making any such claims as now they have admitted in court they think their car is fully self driving which means the car should be liable. Even if Tesla can prove that the car was under manual control the courts are still justified for finding Tesla for anything that happens as they have clearly claimed the car is self driving.

What absurd logical leaps. If this is so clearly the case, then I don't know why every single law firm in the country isn't scrambling to sue Tesla via a class-action right this minute.

Don't arbitration agreements signed by most buyers the reason we'll never see any class actions here?

Most people have not bought a Tesla and so arbitration will not apply. Any by stander in a situation has standing to sue Tesla.

Though that doesn't mean they will. Just because you can sue doesn't mean it is worth it.

Can you bring this up to class action? I'd expect this to more be relevant when the family of someone killed wants to sue. Or more likely the insurance company who just had to pay out some $$$ that they want to recover.

I agree. I just can't understand why the FTC hasn't done anything.

Because it's not profitable, and the FTC actually doesn't care when mega-billionaires break the law for profit.

It should be illegal for them to call it even 1% self driving. Because it is no more than 0% self driving. There is no mode of operation in any Tesla where the human is ever, at any moment, not responsible for safely navigating the vehicle.

Like "full self-driving" but where you're fully driving yourself? I had a '53 Studebaker with that feature.

(this is a lie; never share car ownership details online, banks still don't know that we drive them in public)

It is in California, but it hasn't been enforced yet: https://www.autobodynews.com/news/tesla-not-allowed-to-call-...

Full disclosure: participated in Tesla's IPO, own a Tesla.

Tesla should be doing two things that would greatly reduce their liability while also keeping customers happy. Overall I think it wouldn't change the number of people buying into FSD anyway so there wouldn't be much downside for them.

1. Offer refunds for those for paid for FSD. Full refund until FSD has been enabled for a year and used more than N times, prorated after that based on usage. That gives existing customers a window to try it out and get their money back if they don't like it, with a full refund if they only tried it out or a partial refund even if they used the feature a lot.

2. Be clearer in their marketing and on the purchase page about the feature. Sell your vision of it but also be honest about the current state of it. IMHO it isn't that hard of a sell to most customers but you'd be setting accurate expectations. Tech-aware people or those of us into EV tech are aware of FSD's limits but you are only going to disappoint people if they think FSD really is capable of full unattended self driving right now. That only hurts your brand and erodes trust. You can't hide the details in 6-point lawyerese and expect customers to be happy with you.

I was aware of the limits of FSD when we bought the car and considered it an investment in the future... but I don't use it often and told my spouse not to either. It is a beta feature and must be used with care.

> Be clearer in their marketing and on the purchase page about the feature.

Do you have any examples in mind of where this feature was billed confusingly?

The product page and Model S purchase page both include clear disclaimers in both the first sentence or directly below the bulleted feature list.

> Full Self Driving

> Your vehicle will be able to drive itself almost anywhere with minimal driver intervention and will continuously improve.

https://www.tesla.com/support/autopilot

https://www.tesla.com/models/design#overview

Just the 140 characters you quoted contains a confusing billing, IMO.

Is it "Full Self Driving" xor is "Minimal driver intervention" required?

Maybe 2 lines down will clear things up?

> The currently enabled Autopilot, Enhanced Autopilot and Full Self-Driving features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.

If they also changed "Full" to "Limited" (or "Not Full"), it would be cleared up.

"Full Self Driving" and "vehicle is not autonomous" is still confusing to English speakers, IMO.

Sure, which is why they have dedicated entire sections to outlining it's exact capabilities, as well as software alerts and warnings you must accept before enabling the feature.

> Before enabling Autopilot, the driver first needs to agree to “keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times” and to always “maintain control and responsibility for your vehicle.” Subsequently, every time the driver engages Autopilot, they are shown a visual reminder to “keep your hands on the wheel."

If you bought this car without realizing how it worked... I sympathize, but the info was provided.

If you enabled this feature without understanding how it worked... that's now on you.

I'd say only in this industry but it's not true, it just means technical people are human.

How does that saying go? You'll never convince someone of a fact that their income depends on not knowing?

When someone writes code that is very difficult for anyone else to grok it's the code writers fault, but when someone has a misapprehension of a feature of a car, because it's on the tin SOMEWHERE, it's the fault of the customer who often times is unsophisticated in terms of vehicles and tech within vehicles.

“No”, surely? If it requires constant supervision, it isn’t any sort of self-anything.

Using the correct words would not require another 2 lines to clear things up.

The only reason to label it incorrectly is to falsely advertise.

The Model S Plaid is also not plaid.

I believe this is invented outrage, their actual capabilities are made very clear.

Model S Plaid is not describing the paint scheme of the vehicle. Full Self Driving is the name of the feature specifically chosen to mislead about its capabilities.

> Full Self Driving is the name of the feature specifically chosen to mislead about its capabilities.

Full Self Driving was chosen to describe its intended capabilities exactly.

Was the SLS misleading before its first flight in 2022 because it had yet to launch to space? Were the James Webb or Hubble falsely advertised during production? "They want us to call that thing a 'Space Telescope' when it's obviously a pile of mirrors on the ground..."

It would be wrong to have called Mercury "lunar orbiters" though.

If a space telescope is delivered to astrophysicists for use without being able to do what a telescope should do, hell yeah that's misleading.

There's a massive difference between "I want to build thing x -> I'm building x -> I have built x -> Pay me for x -> Ok, here's your x, go ahead and use x" and "I want to build x in the future -> pay me for x -> here's x, go ahead and use it -> I am building x -> I have built x (I may not be able to build it at all, btw)".

It's mostly not outrage, it's irritation. They don't need to be clowns about it, the name doesn't need to contradict the lengthy explanation of what it actually does.

Nobody would be griping about the name being misleading if it was marketed as Tesla Tartan or something.

Minimal driver intervention isn’t keeping your hands on the wheel at all time and paying attention.

It is if it requires minimal intervention.

Intervention and attention are not the same.

But surely "require active driver supervision" is the same as attention, right?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39360101

Yes, they claim to require full attention and minimal intervention.

> Do you have any examples in mind of where this feature was billed confusingly?

Yes, when they started calling it full self driving, which by any reasonable person’s definition it isn’t. That deception is not entirely ameliorated by using more correct language in other places.

The headline in large type says "Full Self-Driving Capability"

The normal-sized text says "Your car will be able to drive itself almost anywhere with minimal driver intervention and will continuously improve"

Only once you get to the small font do you get "The currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous. The activation and use of these features are dependent on achieving reliability far in excess of human drivers as demonstrated by billions of miles of experience, as well as regulatory approval, which may take longer in some jurisdictions. As these self-driving features evolve, your car will be continuously upgraded through over-the-air software updates."

This is not a truly honest presentation of the feature. It starts by selling the end goal that may or may not be achieved at some undefined point in the future. Then in small print it says the current features don't actually make the car autonomous.

Honest presentation might be something with a headline like "Self-Driving Beta" and in normal text say "Access to current and all future updates as we work toward full self driving. Currently self-driving can navigate most conditions under human supervision. By purchasing self-driving now you automatically get all future improvements as we continuously work toward fully autonomous driving".

If it were up to me I'd also sell this as a perk for "investing" in the company: if you buy self-driving now transfer it to your next Tesla vehicle for free. That makes it a reward for paying $12k for a beta feature and more importantly eliminates any worries that actual full self driving won't arrive before you upgrade vehicles. It also encourages people to be repeat customers.

edit: It appears I was out of date. Tesla now allows you to transfer lifetime supercharging and/or FSD to a new Tesla for free so that's a nice perk and one they should lead with and commit to long-term.

I think the quote from the article really sums it up in plain language, and the argument Musk presents should be familiar to anyone here, who's heard the "Robots > Humans in a car" argument.

> “Regardless of how drunk Hans was, Musk has claimed that this car can drive itself and is essentially better than a human,” Bass said. “We were sold a false sense of security.”

I'm no Tesla fan boy, but it seems entirely possible that even the limited capability of FSD was better/safer than a driver whose BAC was 0.26%, even if this one ended up in a fatal crash, as that happens to drunk human drivers at the rate of more than 10K deaths per year in the US.

If this is the first FSD death in the world, Tesla is probably thankful that it was someone who was hammered.

I believe this is the first fatality where Tesla can't weasel their way out of the cause. There have been multiple crashes, some fatal, where FSD was engaged but disengaged a split second before the crash. So in the mere seconds between the autopilot disengaging and the impact the driver is supposed to be fully up to speed on what's about to happen and avoid it. Also, a lot of these drivers were behaving in a unsympathetic manor (ie sleeping while FSD engaged) and the jury determined they were being a bit more reckless than what the media would let you believe.

The problem is that someone who was hammered might have taken a Taxi home if they didn't have a car that claimed it could drive them home autonomously. In which case it doesn't matter how much better FSD is than a drunk driver. A colleague of mine actually bought a Tesla for this reason - to get them home safely from the bar. Tesla's marketing is way out of step from their actual capabilities and it gives people a false sense of security.

> 1. Ship a clearly half baked system called "Full Self Driving".

In my opinion unless the manufacturer accepts legal liability[1], it's not "self-driving" despite any marketing to the contrary. "Put your money where your mouth is."

Tesla's marketing has been extremely misleading in this regard.

[1] https://insideevs.com/news/575160/mercedes-accepts-legal-res...

6. Refuse to turn over crash data you have to investigators

7. Somehow manage to set conditions that prohibit the government from disclosing the data you do eventually provide

Edit: forgot one!

8. Decide that RADAR sensors are too expensive, and stop using them. But because you don't want owners, the public, press, or regulators to see how much worse the stereo camera systems perform compared to combined radar and and camera, disable the RADAR in all the older cars

Well, I mean I think it’s expensive to try to maintain two systems - one with LIDAR and the other without.

one would expect that to be a part of the calculus for stopping to offer them, but apparently it wasn't.

9. And never include LIDAR in the first place...

Anecdotal, but I have a car with radar installed, didn’t notice that it was disabled, fwiw. It’s better now than when the car was new.

He was not on FSD. The software had unfortunately never been downloaded. I say “unfortunately”, because the accident probably would not have happened if FSD had been engaged - Elon Musk

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1757652781010497798?s=20

Oh. Well he always truthfully and accurately represents the situation so I guess that’s the end of that.

Hopefully Tesla gets sued for false claims...