Tesla autopilot on trial: DMV seeks to suspend the company from doing business in California

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

July 21, 2025


The fate of Tesla’s business in California, at least for the next 30 days, could be decided in a stuffy second-floor hearing room in Oakland. There, attorneys for the electric car company and the Department of Motor Vehicles are facing off this week before an administrative judge, over claims that Tesla deceived consumers with its autopilot and self-driving features.

Officials at the DMV filed those allegations in July 2022 and amended them in November 2023, seeking to suspend Tesla’s licenses to manufacture and sell vehicles in California for at least 30 days. Additionally, the department is pursuing a court order for the electric vehicle to pay an undetermined sum in restitution. In court filings, attorneys for the state Department of Justice have cited four phrases or product descriptions from Tesla’s website that state officials describe as misleading or that amount to false advertising.

These include: “autopilot”; “full self-driving capability”; a promise that the system “is designed to be able to conduct short and long-distance trips with no action required by the person in the driver’s seat”; and claims that cars can effectively drive people to their destinations, with the vehicle navigating streets, freeways and intersections and then automatically parking itself. “These labels and descriptions represent specifically that respondent (Tesla)’s vehicles will operate as autonomous vehicles, which they could not and cannot do,” Attorney General Rob Bonta wrote in a July 17 brief.

Attorneys for Tesla argue, to the contrary, that while the company’s driver assistance technology qualifies as “state of the art,” the company “has always made clear” that its vehicles are not fully autonomous, and that they require “active driver supervision” from a human. On Monday, each side presented opening statements before Administrative Judge Juliet Cox, and laid out how the case could shape how self-driving car features are marketed in the future.

Read more: https://www.sfchronicle.com/california/article/tesla-self-driving-dmv-20778527.php