It may have taken more than a year, but Tesla has finally responded to the California Department of Motor Vehicles’ accusations that it misrepresented Autopilot’s capabilities, arguing that it’s free to do so under the US Constitution.
In a document [PDF] filed with the California Office of Administrative Hearings last week, lawyers representing Elon Musk’s electric car company didn’t directly challenge the DMV’s specific allegations that Tesla may have overstated Autopilot’s autonomy by marketing it less as an advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) and more as a full self-driving platform.
Instead, they said the DMV’s case, filed in July 2022, should be thrown out because it’s “facially invalid under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and Article I, Section 2 of the California Constitution”.
“These statutes and regulations, as applied to Tesla in this lawsuit, are unconstitutional … because they impermissibly restrict Tesla’s truthful and non-misleading speech about its vehicles and their features,” Tesla’s lawyers argued.
It’s not clear whether the “truthful and non-misleading speech” refers to Autopilot’s capabilities, which the company doesn’t otherwise defend in its rebuttal. We’ve contacted Tesla and its lawyers about this case.
Several US regulators have launched investigations into the hype surrounding Autopilot’s capabilities, including the US Department of Justice. The DoJ subpoenaed Tesla in the case in October, requesting additional information about Autopilot’s capabilities.
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is also investigating whether Tesla’s marketing of Autopilot has led drivers to place too much trust in the system’s capabilities, exacerbating safety risks.
All the ways Tesla says the DMV case fails
In addition to its First Amendment argument, Tesla also said the California DMV is violating its right to a jury trial under the 7th Amendment to the US Constitution and Article I, Section 16 of the California Constitution, both of which cover the right to trial by jury. The DMV’s actions violate that right because the case is being heard by an administrative law judge rather than a panel of citizens, the lawyers argue.
Tesla also claims the DMV has no right to prosecute it for false advertising of Autopilot’s capabilities because it was well aware of how the company was describing it, but didn’t take action before.
“Plaintiff has been aware of Tesla’s use of the brand names Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Capability since Tesla began using those names in 2014 and 2016, respectively,” Tesla said.
“Prior to plaintiff’s filing of the original complaint in July 2022, plaintiff had never told Tesla to stop using these brand names or otherwise indicated to Tesla that these brand names or its advertising were in any way problematic.”
Tesla also argued that the DMV had investigated its ADAS advertising twice before, in 2014 and 2017, and decided to take no action at the time. We asked the DMV why it waited to sue Tesla after its investigations, but haven’t heard back.
What’s more, Tesla said that California has decided to remove the terms ‘self-driving’, ‘automated’ and ‘autopilot’ from the state’s Statement on Autonomous Technology Regulation, meaning there is no ban on using such language in an advertisement.
However, the statement does mention that the use of terms that are “likely to lead a reasonably prudent person to believe that a vehicle is autonomous … constitutes an advertisement that the vehicle is autonomous for purposes of this section,” so it’s unclear whether Tesla’s argument here would have much merit.
Tesla is seeking a hearing to have the case dismissed with prejudice.
