Tesla is feeling the pressure as owners in multiple countries start suing for Elon Musk’s false promises over Full Self-Driving mode’s capabilities. And it’s not afraid to do illegal things to avoid the consequences.
In a recent report from Electrek, owners are coming forward and accusing Tesla of changing the language in their original, old contracts to reflect Full Self-Driving mode’s shortcomings. The owners claim that purchase agreements for the FSD feature signed between 2016 and 2024 now include “supervised” throughout.
In other cases, drivers can’t open the contract at all. 2018 Model 3 owner Oliver Abcarius said he bought FSD in 2019. Years later, FSD doesn’t come close to what Musk promised. He’s been saying vehicles with HW3 will eventually be autonomous for a decade now. Since then, Tesla has been touting FSD as a miracle for disabled people who otherwise shouldn’t drive.
Due to these claims, Abcarius was going to start a refund case. He went to pull up his purchase agreement and noticed it was renamed “Full-Self Driving (Supervised).” When he tried to open the document, the page was invalid.
The issue? Electrek pointed out that Tesla hasn’t used “supervised” in its language for FSD until 2024. This made it quite clear to the drivers that Tesla had gone back and changed their contract language.
“Tesla has retroactively updated my documents from 2019 when I paid for FSD,” Abcarius told Electrek. “Back in 2019, Tesla did not contain ‘supervised’ language in the purchase agreement. I can no longer actually open the document as it links to an invalid page.”
Tesla’s ongoing issues with FSD claims
Elon Musk was forced to admit that autonomous driving was impossible for HW3 vehicles — after spending over a decade claiming it was coming — in an earnings call earlier this year.
“Unfortunately, Hardware 3, I wish it were otherwise, but Hardware 3 simply does not have the capability to achieve unsupervised FSD,” Musk said in April. “We did think at one point it would, but relative to Hardware 4 it has only 1/8 the memory bandwidth of Hardware 4.”
This led to a massive lawsuit in China, with 10 owners currently suing Tesla for never providing the autonomous driving Musk claimed was coming — that they had paid for. In the United States, a few individuals have started going to court in hopes of getting their $10,000 back.
A judge also upheld a $243 million jury verdict earlier this year involving a fatal crash involving autopilot back in 2019. California also forced Tesla to stop using “Autopilot” due to its misleading label earlier this year. This same Autopilot feature led to a Cybertruck crash in 2025, leading to yet another lawsuit.
Do I think people should be dumb enough to believe anything Musk says about FSD? No. But does that mean Musk should continue to make up things? No.
Clearly, Tesla is feeling the pressure from all these lawsuits over its misleading marketing and over-the-top claims. The automaker is maybe hoping that adding “supervised” to the language in those contracts will get them out of some of these lawsuits. But I think it’s illegal to change old contracts on its own.
Yeah, here you go: “Under general contract law, a binding contract cannot be altered unilaterally.”
Unfortunately, I can’t see this going anywhere. Per usual. But it should at least be another warning to Tesla owners that they should be a lot more wary of the company.
