News
Opinion: Tesla is getting sued by cops because a drunk driver was behind the wheel
Five Texas law enforcement officers are suing Tesla for monetary relief of over $1,000,000 after a Tesla Model X collided into the cops and their vehicles. The driver operating the Tesla Model X was inebriated at the time, based on the police report.
On February 27, 2021, a Tesla Model X, reportedly with Autopilot engaged, crashed into five police officers on the Eastex Freeway in Texas. The plaintiffs claim that Tesla’s safety features failed to detect the officers’ cars because of “manufacturing defects.”
The TX police officers are also suing Pappas Restaurant INC., which owns the Pappasito’s Cantina, where the Tesla Model X driver was served alcohol before the accident. The police report from the crash stated that the driver was arrested “on suspicion of intoxication assault.”
Tesla Autopilot vs. FSD Confusion Continues
Any Tesla owner or supporter who reads the lawsuit will quickly identify the lawsuit’s inaccuracies about Autopilot. The most obvious flaw in the lawsuit would be how it confuses Tesla Autopilot with Tesla’s Full Self-Driving suite.
The lawsuit lists supposed Autopilot features to support the plaintiff’s claim that Tesla inaccurately marketed its driver assistance system as safe. The lawsuit claims it compiled the list of Autopilot features from Tesla’s website. The list includes the “Navigate on Autopilot” feature, which is currently listed under the Full Self-Driving suite.
The lawsuit also includes tweets from Elon Musk. In one instance, the lawsuit states: “Tesla, Inc. and its CEO, Elon Musk, have also repeatedly exaggerated the actual capabilities of Autopilot, resulting in the public, including first responders, and Tesla drivers being put at a significant risk of serious injury or death:”
Then the lawsuit includes the following screenshot of an Elon Musk tweet, which clearly references FSD.
This recent lawsuit by five Texas cops reveals the ongoing confusion about Tesla’s safety features, particularly between Autopilot and Full Self-Driving. It also shows the continuous fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) Tesla critics sow about its safety systems.
The Irony of Tesla Autopilot Criticism
Ironically, Tesla created Autopilot and its Full Self-Driving suite to prevent people from misusing their vehicles, such as in this case, where the driver operated a Tesla Model X irresponsibly. Critics against Tesla Autopilot and Full Self-Driving constantly blame the company for drivers misusing their vehicles, as shown by this recent lawsuit against the company.
During the last earnings call, Elon Musk explained, once again, why software like Autopilot and Tesla FSD are necessary for modern vehicles.
“At scale, it will have billions of miles of travel to be able to show that it is the safety of the car with autopilot on is 100% or 200% or more safer than the average human driver,” Musk said. “At that point, I think it would be unconscionable to not to allow autopilot because the car just becomes way less safe. It would be sort of like shake the elevator analogy. Back in the day, we used to have elevator operators with a big switch. They operate the elevator and move between floors.”
“But they get tired or maybe drunk or something or distracted and every now and again, somebody would be kind of sheared in half between floors. That’s kind of the situation we have with cars. Autonomy will become so safe that it will be unsafe to manually operate the car relatively speaking. And today obviously we just get an elevator where we press the button for which floor we want, and it just takes us there safely,” he explained.
A copy of the lawsuit can be seen below.
Lawsuit Filed Against Tesla and Pappas Restaurants by Maria Merano on Scribd
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News
Tesla FSD’s newest model is coming, and it sounds like ‘the last big piece of the puzzle’
“There’s a model that’s an order of magnitude larger that will be deployed in January or February 2026.”
Tesla Full Self-Driving’s newest model is coming very soon, and from what it sounds like, it could be “the last big piece of the puzzle,” as CEO Elon Musk said in late November.
During the xAI Hackathon on Tuesday, Musk was available for a Q&A session, where he revealed some details about Robotaxi and Tesla’s plans for removing Robotaxi Safety Monitors, and some information on a future FSD model.
While he said Full Self-Driving’s unsupervised capability is “pretty much solved,” and confirmed it will remove Safety Monitors in the next three weeks, questions about the company’s ability to give this FSD version to current owners came to mind.
Musk said a new FSD model is coming in about a month or two that will be an order-of-magnitude larger and will include more reasoning and reinforcement learning.
He said:
“There’s a model that’s an order of magnitude larger that will be deployed in January or February 2026. We’re gonna add a lot of reasoning and RL (reinforcement learning). To get to serious scale, Tesla will probably need to build a giant chip fab. To have a few hundred gigawatts of AI chips per year, I don’t see that capability coming online fast enough, so we will probably have to build a fab.”
NEWS: Elon Musk says FSD Unsupervised is “pretty much solved at this point” and that @Tesla will be launching Robotaxis with no safety monitors in about 3 weeks in Austin, Texas. He also teased a new FSD model is coming in about 1-2 months.
“We’re just going through validation… https://t.co/Msne72cgMB pic.twitter.com/i3wfKX3Z0r
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) December 10, 2025
It rings back to late November when Musk said that v14.3 “is where the last big piece of the puzzle finally lands.”
With the advancements made through Full Self-Driving v14 and v14.2, there seems to be a greater confidence in solving self-driving completely. Musk has also personally said that driver monitoring has been more relaxed, and looking at your phone won’t prompt as many alerts in the latest v14.2.1.
This is another indication that Tesla is getting closer to allowing people to take their eyes off the road completely.
Along with the Robotaxi program’s success, there is evidence that Tesla could be close to solving FSD. However, it is not perfect. We’ve had our own complaints with FSD, and although we feel it is the best ADAS on the market, it is not, in its current form, able to perform everything needed on roads.
But it is close.
That’s why there is some legitimate belief that Tesla could be releasing a version capable of no supervision in the coming months.
All we can say is, we’ll see.
Investor's Corner
SpaceX IPO is coming, CEO Elon Musk confirms
However, it appears Musk is ready for SpaceX to go public, as Ars Technica Senior Space Editor Eric Berger wrote an op-ed that indicated he thought SpaceX would go public soon. Musk replied, basically confirming it.
Elon Musk confirmed through a post on X that a SpaceX initial public offering (IPO) is on the way after hinting at it several times earlier this year.
It also comes one day after Bloomberg reported that SpaceX was aiming for a valuation of $1.5 trillion, adding that it wanted to raise $30 billion.
Musk has been transparent for most of the year that he wanted to try to figure out a way to get Tesla shareholders to invest in SpaceX, giving them access to the stock.
He has also recognized the issues of having a public stock, like litigation exposure, quarterly reporting pressures, and other inconveniences.
However, it appears Musk is ready for SpaceX to go public, as Ars Technica Senior Space Editor Eric Berger wrote an op-ed that indicated he thought SpaceX would go public soon.
Musk replied, basically confirming it:
As usual, Eric is accurate
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 10, 2025
Berger believes the IPO would help support the need for $30 billion or more in capital needed to fund AI integration projects, such as space-based data centers and lunar satellite factories. Musk confirmed recently that SpaceX “will be doing” data centers in orbit.
AI appears to be a “key part” of SpaceX getting to Musk, Berger also wrote. When writing about whether or not Optimus is a viable project and product for the company, he says that none of that matters. Musk thinks it is, and that’s all that matters.
It seems like Musk has certainly mulled something this big for a very long time, and the idea of taking SpaceX public is not just likely; it is necessary for the company to get to Mars.
The details of when SpaceX will finally hit that public status are not known. Many of the reports that came out over the past few days indicate it would happen in 2026, so sooner rather than later.
But there are a lot of things on Musk’s plate early next year, especially with Cybercab production, the potential launch of Unsupervised Full Self-Driving, and the Roadster unveiling, all planned for Q1.
Tesla has added the 15th automaker to the growing list of companies whose EVs can utilize the Supercharger Network this year, as BMW is the latest company to gain access to the largest charging infrastructure in the world.
BMW became the 15th company in 2025 to gain Tesla Supercharger access, after the company confirmed to its EV owners that they could use any of the more than 25,000 Supercharging stalls in North America.
Welcome @BMW owners.
Download the Tesla app to charge → https://t.co/vnu0NHA7Ab
— Tesla Charging (@TeslaCharging) December 10, 2025
Newer BMW all-electric cars, like the i4, i5, i7, and iX, are able to utilize Tesla’s V3 and V4 Superchargers. These are the exact model years, via the BMW Blog:
- i4: 2022-2026 model years
- i5: 2024-2025 model years
- 2026 i5 (eDrive40 and xDrive40) after software update in Spring 2026
- i7: 2023-2026 model years
- iX: 2022-2025 model years
- 2026 iX (all versions) after software update in Spring 2026
With the expansion of the companies that gained access in 2025 to the Tesla Supercharger Network, a vast majority of non-Tesla EVs are able to use the charging stalls to gain range in their cars.
So far in 2025, Tesla has enabled Supercharger access to:
- Audi
- BMW
- Genesis
- Honda
- Hyundai
- Jaguar Land Rover
- Kia
- Lucid
- Mercedes-Benz
- Nissan
- Polestar
- Subaru
- Toyota
- Volkswagen
- Volvo
Drivers with BMW EVs who wish to charge at Tesla Superchargers must use an NACS-to-CCS1 adapter. In Q2 2026, BMW plans to release its official adapter, but there are third-party options available in the meantime.
They will also have to use the Tesla App to enable Supercharging access to determine rates and availability. It is a relatively seamless process.
Tesla FSD’s newest model is coming, and it sounds like ‘the last big piece of the puzzle’
SpaceX IPO is coming, CEO Elon Musk confirms
