Regulators have in fact found Tesla's driver-assistance marketing misleading, so this is not a baseless smear. The California DMV brought a case arguing that the names "Autopilot" and "Full Self-Driving" and Tesla's related advertising overstated what the cars can do, and in December 2025 a California administrative judge ruled that Tesla had deceptively marketed the technology and ordered it to fix the marketing (Tesla then sued the DMV to reverse the ruling, and the DMV ultimately declined to suspend Tesla's sales license). This echoes an earlier 2020 German court ruling against Tesla's Autopilot advertising. The defense is not that the names are perfect — reasonable people think "Full Self-Driving" oversells a system that legally requires an attentive driver — but that Tesla does disclose the supervision requirement in its materials and in the car, that the underlying technology is genuinely among the most capable driver-assistance systems sold, and that a naming dispute is a marketing-truth question, not proof the cars are unsafe or that owners were sold a product that doesn't exist. Verdict: mixed — the "misleading name/marketing" finding is real and Tesla lost a regulatory ruling on it; "illegally lies" overstates a contested advertising-standards fight Tesla is still litigating.