Tesla owners are reporting that old contracts mentioning the company’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature have been quietly changed.
Electrek reports that it confirmed with multiple Tesla owners that purchase agreements for the FSD feature signed between 2016 and early 2024 now include “supervised” language. In some cases, owners say the original documents are also no longer accessible online.
Oliver Abcarius, who owns a 2018 Model 3, told Electrek that he bought FSD for his car in 2019. He recently tried to pull up the purchase agreement while preparing a refund case and noticed that the document had been renamed “Full-Self Driving (Supervised) – August 12, 2019.” But when he tried to open the document, the link led to an invalid page, according to a screenshot published by Electrek.
The catch is that Tesla did not start using the “supervised” language for the feature until 2024.
“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.”
Abcarius said the same thing happened with documents for his wife’s 2020 Model Y, which was bought with FSD. He said the “Motor Vehicle Purchase Agreement” is no longer accessible.
According to Abcarius, the couple’s other Tesla documents are still available, but the documents that would include details about their FSD purchases are not.
Electrek says it confirmed that other owners of HW3 Teslas, an older version of Tesla’s self-driving hardware, have run into the same issue.
For years, Tesla sold the software package with the label “Full Self-Driving Capability,” claiming that cars would eventually be able to fully drive themselves through future software updates. But in 2024, the company renamed the feature “Full Self-Driving (Supervised),” making clear that the technology still requires human oversight.
That distinction matters even more now. A few months ago, Elon Musk confirmed that Tesla vehicles with HW3 will never be able to achieve unsupervised self-driving capabilities.
“Unfortunately, Hardware 3, I wish it were otherwise, but Hardware 3 simply does not have the capability to achieve unsupervised FSD,” Musk said during an earnings call 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.”
All of this comes as Tesla is facing growing legal scrutiny over its driver-assistance technology and how it has marketed it.
Earlier this year, a judge upheld a $243 million jury verdict in a case involving a fatal 2019 crash tied to Tesla’s Autopilot feature in Florida.
In February, the California Department of Motor Vehicles also announced that Tesla had stopped using the term “Autopilot” in marketing its vehicles in the state, calling the label misleading. The change allowed Tesla to avoid a 30-day suspension of its dealer and manufacturer licenses in California.
Tesla is also facing a separate lawsuit in Texas over a Cybertruck crash involving its self-driving tech.
In that case, the plaintiff, Justine Saint Amour, says she purchased her Cybertruck in February 2025. A few months later, on August 18, she was driving in Houston with Autopilot engaged when she approached a Y-shaped overpass. According to the lawsuit, the vehicle failed to curve to the right and instead continued straight toward a concrete barrier and the freeway below. Saint Amour alleges she disengaged Autopilot and tried to regain control but was unable to avoid crashing into the barrier.
The lawsuit argues that Tesla is responsible for the crash because of its engineering choices and allegedly misleading marketing.
Electrek also notes that Tesla has removed material tied to its self-driving tech before. In August 2024, Tesla pulled a blog post from October 2016 that said “all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory — including Model 3 — will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver.”
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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