An 80-year-old retired attorney near San Francisco is leading a class-action lawsuit against Tesla, accusing the automaker of selling customers a self-driving future that, nine years and four hardware revisions later, still has not arrived.
Tom LoSavio paid more than $100,000 for a Tesla Model S in 2017. He added another $8,000 for what Tesla described as lifetime access to its self-driving technology. The promise, as LoSavio understood it, was straightforward: the car would eventually drive itself.
It hasn't. And LoSavio is not alone. His California lawsuit represents roughly 3,000 owners who bought or leased Teslas between 2016 and 2024 and paid extra for autonomous capability that the suit says was never delivered. The case seeks refunds and a court order barring Tesla from marketing its products as fully autonomous, the New York Post reported.
The timeline of Elon Musk's self-driving promises reads like a catalog of missed deadlines. In October 2015, Musk said "full autonomy" would arrive in three years. By December of that year, he shortened the estimate to two years. In 2016, he declared a fully autonomous Tesla would drive from Los Angeles to New York City by 2017.
None of that happened.
What did happen was a rolling series of hardware upgrades. By 2020 and 2021, Tesla's older models needed new equipment to run the company's evolving driver-assistance software. Tesla offered free upgrades to some owners. Others were charged a one-time fee of $1,000. Then in 2023, Tesla upgraded its hardware for the fourth time, leaving many earlier vehicles further behind.
In January 2025, Musk acknowledged that customers who bought the lifetime Full Self-Driving guarantee would need their computers updated yet again. The company's current "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)" system is available as a $99 monthly subscription, a far cry from the permanent, hands-free autonomy early buyers thought they were purchasing.
Musk's own words captured the gap between the pitch and the product. In a statement cited in reporting on the lawsuit, he said:
"That is the honest answer and that's going to be painful and difficult. But we'll get it done."
He also offered a remark that will not comfort the people who wrote five-figure checks based on his earlier projections:
"Now, I'm kind of glad that not that many people bought the FSD package."
LoSavio told the Wall Street Journal why he made the purchase in the first place:
"My wife and I talked about what a great thing it would be if we could just get in a car and have it drive us places."
That aspiration is understandable. An elderly couple looking for safe, reliable transportation trusted a company that told them full autonomy was just around the corner. The lawsuit alleges Tesla's older vehicles "still aren't capable of true autopilot", nine years after LoSavio's initial purchase.
The company has since ended certain Autopilot features in North America, adding another layer to the frustration felt by owners who believed they were buying into a seamless autonomous future.
LoSavio put the emotional weight of the situation plainly:
"You want to believe that you're not a fool."
The lawsuit says millions of Tesla vehicles with outdated hardware remain on the road. That figure dwarfs the roughly 3,000 California plaintiffs in LoSavio's class. If the legal theory holds, the exposure for Tesla could extend well beyond this single case.
Tesla is appealing the case's class-action status. Neither Tesla nor Musk's lawyer responded to the Post's requests for comment.
The California suit is not an isolated event. Breitbart reported that similar legal and consumer actions are emerging in Australia and Europe, where owners also claim Tesla sold vehicles or packages advertised as capable of full self-driving that still do not function as promised. An Australian law firm has assembled its own class-action case accusing Tesla of misleading consumers about its self-driving technology.
In the Netherlands, a Tesla owner named Mischa Sigtermans described his reasoning for buying the self-driving package: "Why did I buy it? Because I believed they would make it happen." The Netherlands approved the use of Tesla's self-driving technology for the first time last week, but only for the latest version of its software, leaving early adopters out of luck.
That pattern, newer customers gaining access to features while older buyers are left behind, sits at the heart of the legal complaints on three continents. Customers paid for a product defined by a future promise. The future kept moving. The promise kept changing. And the bills stayed paid.
The LoSavio suit targets customers who bought or leased new Tesla vehicles between 2016 and 2024 and paid extra with the expectation their cars would eventually be fully self-driving. The relief sought is twofold: refunds for those buyers, and a ban on Tesla marketing its products as fully autonomous.
This comes at a difficult moment for the automaker. Tesla recently delivered one of its weakest quarters in years as a broader sales slump deepens. Legal liability on top of declining revenue is a combination that should concern shareholders and executives alike.
Tesla is eyeing Cybercab volume production this month, a sign the company is still betting heavily on autonomous technology. Whether the next generation of products will deliver on promises the last generation could not remains an open question. The company has also been pursuing a $20 billion transformation strategy that hinges in part on autonomous vehicle technology becoming a commercial reality.
Some agreements signed by Tesla owners may prevent them from suing, though the specifics of those contracts remain unclear in public reporting. That legal wrinkle could limit the class size, or it could become its own battleground if courts decide the underlying marketing claims were deceptive enough to void such provisions.
Online, Tesla owners have not been shy. One Reddit user wrote: "Tesla is living on the fumes of their hype machine and it's just about exhausted that." Another was blunter, calling the company's decade of self-driving projections "absolute bulls*** lies" and expressing hope that "the consumer side is wising up and will quit paying money for vaporware."
A third offered sarcasm: "Oh, c'mon, folks! Have more patience. FSD should be here as soon as humanoid robots go into mass production next week."
Those are anonymous internet comments, not sworn testimony. But they reflect a mood among a customer base that was once fiercely loyal. Tesla built its brand on the promise of the future. When the future keeps getting postponed, brand loyalty has a shelf life.
Meanwhile, Tesla has introduced lower-priced Cybertruck options and launched pilot programs of driverless robotaxis, moves that suggest the company is still chasing the autonomous dream, even as older customers feel left behind by it.
Several facts remain unclear. The court handling the LoSavio case, the exact filing date, and the specific Tesla models and hardware versions covered by the class have not been disclosed in available reporting. Nor is it clear what software or hardware version the Netherlands approved. These details will matter as the litigation moves forward, and as Tesla mounts its appeal of the class-action certification.
Conservative readers who value honest markets and fair dealing should watch this case closely. The question is not whether autonomous driving technology is worth pursuing. It plainly is. The question is whether a company can sell a product based on a promise, collect payment, move the goalposts for a decade, and call it innovation. Courts in California, Australia, and Europe are about to weigh in.
Consumers deserve to know what they're buying. When a company charges $8,000 for a future that never arrives, the market has a word for that, and it isn't "disruption."