Tesla Autopilot and FSD crashes in CaliforniaA driver-assist crash, not a driverless one.

This page is for people hurt in a crash involving a Tesla using Autopilot or Full Self-Driving (Supervised): people in another car, people on foot or on a bike or motorcycle, passengers, the Tesla's own driver, and families after a death. It covers how California law classifies these systems, who may be responsible, the federal record and the car's data. Cars with no one in the driver's seat are on our self-driving car accident page.

Wise Personal Injury & Accident Law, APC is not affiliated with Tesla, Inc. Tesla's brand and product names appear here only to identify the vehicle and its features.

Tesla status in California

The sources are the DMV's permit holder page and the CPUC's list of autonomous vehicle permits. A DMV permit to test with a safety driver allows testing "on any public road within the State of California" with that driver in the seat. Carrying passengers in an autonomous vehicle needs separate CPUC authority, and the CPUC lists none for Tesla.

Level 2 under California law

A Tesla on Autopilot or Full Self-Driving (Supervised) falls outside California's definition of an autonomous vehicle. Vehicle Code section 38750(a)(2) covers technology meeting Level 3, 4 or 5 of the SAE J3016 standard. It excludes systems that "enhance safety or provide driver assistance, but are not capable, collectively or singularly, of driving the vehicle without the active control or monitoring of a human operator." Vehicle Code section 24011.5, in effect since January 1, 2023, calls a Level 2 system a "partial driving automation feature."

The CPUC agrees. Its August 2025 order opening rulemaking R.25-08-013 says Level 2 vehicles "would not be part of the Commission's AV permitting program" (CPUC order). So the driverless-car rules do not apply: no $5 million manufacturer financial responsibility rule, no 30-second sensor-data rule, and no police notice of autonomous vehicle noncompliance under Vehicle Code section 38752. Our page on California autonomous vehicle law explains those rules.

Tesla's own descriptions

Tesla calls these systems driver assistance in its own federal filings. In a recall report submitted December 12, 2023 for 2,031,220 vehicles (recall 23V-838), Tesla wrote: "When Autosteer is engaged, as with all SAE Level 2 advanced driver-assistance features and systems, the driver is the operator of the vehicle." Its February 2023 recall of FSD Beta (23V-085) says "the driver is responsible for operation of the vehicle whenever the feature is engaged and must constantly supervise the feature and intervene."

NHTSA, the federal vehicle safety agency, wrote on October 7, 2025 that "Tesla characterizes FSD as an SAE Level 2 partial automation system requiring a fully attentive driver" (PE25-012). Tesla's fourth-quarter 2025 shareholder update footnotes FSD (Supervised): "Active driver supervision required; does not make the vehicle autonomous." Those words put the person behind the wheel first in line.

The DMV marketing decision

On December 16, 2025, the DMV adopted an administrative law judge's proposed decision that Tesla's use of "autopilot" and "Full Self-Driving Capability" was misleading and violated state law (Case Nos. 21-02188 and 21-02189). The DMV's announcement says the advertised features "could not at the time of those advertisements, and cannot now, operate as autonomous vehicles." The DMV imposed "a permanent stay of the suspension of Tesla's manufacturer's license" and gave Tesla 60 days to act. On February 17, 2026, it announced that Tesla had stopped using "Autopilot" in its California marketing and so avoided a 30-day suspension of its dealer and manufacturer licenses.

The decision concerns advertising, not any crash. For a crash claim, the useful text is Vehicle Code section 24011.5(d): compliance with California's driver-assist marketing rules "shall not alter any existing duty of care or limit the civil liability of a manufacturer or dealer, including, but not limited to, claims for negligence or product defect."

Tesla's Bay Area ride service

Tesla runs a ride-hailing service in the San Francisco Bay Area, and every car has a person in the driver's seat. Tesla told the CPUC on January 30, 2026: "Tesla does not currently possess the requisite permits to operate autonomous rideshare vehicles in California. Pursuant to Tesla's transportation charter-party carrier (TCP) permit, all rides are conducted with a safety driver in the driver's seat using Tesla's SAE Level 2 Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS), Full Self-Driving (Supervised)" (Tesla CPUC comments). In October 2025 comments, Tesla said the service began in July 2025 and had completed "over 40,000 rides."

A crash in one of these rides is a crash in a human-driven car hired for pay. A charter-party carrier is a company the CPUC licenses to carry passengers for compensation, and General Order 115-G requires each one to carry liability coverage of at least $750,000 for a vehicle seating eight or fewer, including the driver. That is a minimum, not a cap on a claim. A rider's claim may look at the driver, the carrier and, if the facts point there, the system. Have a lawyer read the app terms you accepted, which may require arbitration. Our guide to rideshare passenger injury claims covers human-driven rides; the robotaxi passenger page covers driverless ones.

Austin and the Cybercab

News about Teslas with no one in the driver's seat comes from Texas and does not change Tesla's status in California. NHTSA opened an audit on September 3, 2026 after Tesla "began commercial deployment with a small number of its Cybercab vehicles in Austin, Texas," vehicles that lack "a brake pedal, gas pedal, steering wheel, and mirrors" (AQ26-002, open). In NHTSA's crash-report file for automated driving systems released September 15, 2026, every Tesla report lists a Texas location. As of October 5, 2026, Tesla holds no California driverless testing permit, no deployment permit and no CPUC autonomous vehicle permit.

Fault in a driver-assist crash

In a Level 2 crash, the first question is how the person behind the wheel drove. A driver who lets the car run a red light or drift across a lane can be negligent, meaning careless in a way that causes harm, whether or not a driver-assist feature was on. Traffic rules still apply; Vehicle Code section 21703, for example, bars following "more closely than is reasonable and prudent."

The driver's liability policy usually pays first. For policies issued or renewed on or after January 1, 2025, the minimum is $30,000 for one person's injury, $60,000 per accident and $15,000 for property (Vehicle Code section 16056). An owner who lent the car is liable under section 17150, limited by section 17151 to $15,000 per person when not based on agency or employment. If coverage falls short, your own uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage may help. Fault can be shared: under Civil Code section 1431.2, each defendant pays non-economic damages, such as pain and suffering, only in proportion to its own share of fault.

Product claims against Tesla

Tesla can be responsible as a manufacturer when the evidence shows that a defect in the car or its software, or an inadequate warning, helped cause the harm. Tesla's recall reports list the defective component as "Vehicle Software." In recall 23V-838, Tesla said "the prominence and scope of the feature's controls may not be sufficient to prevent driver misuse" of Autosteer. Closing its Autopilot engineering analysis on April 25, 2024, NHTSA wrote that its work "showed evidence that Tesla's weak driver engagement system was not appropriate for Autopilot's permissive operating capabilities" (EA22-002).

Those statements are not findings about any single crash. A product claim must show how the system behaved in your crash and why that was a defect, which is why the car's own data matters. Since January 1, 2026, Civil Code section 1714.46 bars a defendant that developed or used artificial intelligence from arguing "that the artificial intelligence autonomously caused the harm." It creates no liability, still allows evidence of others' fault, and has not been applied to a driver-assist feature. Our page on who is liable when a self-driving car crashes covers product law for driverless cars.

Federal investigations and recalls

An open investigation is a question, not a finding. PE25-012 concerns reports of FSD "proceeding through red traffic signals and driving against the proper direction of travel." EA26-002 asks whether FSD detects reduced visibility and warns the driver in time. RQ24-009 notes "at least 13 crashes involving one or more fatalities" found earlier in which "foreseeable driver misuse of the system played an apparent role." AQ25-002 reviews reports filed "several months or more" after the crashes. Status is from NHTSA's investigation file.

Federal crash reports

Tesla reports some crashes to NHTSA under its Standing General Order. For a Level 2 system, a report is required only if the system was engaged in the 30 seconds before the crash or during it, and the crash sent someone to a hospital, killed someone, deployed an air bag or struck a pedestrian, cyclist or other vulnerable road user. Those reports are due "within five days" (NHTSA notice, May 26, 2026).

Tesla's reports go to NHTSA's Level 2 file. In the September 15, 2026 release, Tesla claimed confidential business information over the narrative of every one of its reports, so the public version does not describe what happened. NHTSA's data dictionary warns that "Summary incident report data are not normalized." A report shows that a crash was reported, not who caused it. Our self-driving car crash lookup searches the driverless file and helps identify the company behind a car.

The Mountain View NTSB report

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) completed its investigation of a 2018 Autopilot crash in Mountain View (HWY18FH011). On March 23, 2018, a 2017 Tesla Model X traveling south on US-101 entered the gore at the State Route 85 exit and struck a damaged, nonoperational crash attenuator at about 71 mph. The driver died. In report HAR-20/01, adopted February 25, 2020, the Board found the probable cause was "the Tesla Autopilot system steering the sport utility vehicle into a highway gore area due to system limitations, and the driver's lack of response due to distraction likely from a cell phone game application and overreliance on the Autopilot partial driving automation system." It also cited "ineffective monitoring of driver engagement" and, for the severity of the injuries, an attenuator left unrepaired after the California Highway Patrol failed to report earlier damage, along with Caltrans maintenance problems.

Federal law limits how such a report is used. Under 49 U.S.C. 1154(b), "No part of a report of the Board, related to an accident or an investigation of an accident, may be admitted into evidence or used in a civil action for damages resulting from a matter mentioned in the report." The NTSB's rule, 49 CFR 835.2, says there is "no statutory bar to" admitting factual accident reports, the investigators' findings of fact.

The Benavides verdict

Benavides v. Tesla, Inc. was tried to a federal jury in Florida under Florida law. It concerns a 2019 crash in Key Largo involving a 2019 Model S equipped with Autopilot. The jury found for the plaintiffs on defective design and failure to warn and found Tesla 33 percent responsible. The final judgment, entered in August 2025, is $242,570,000, including $200,000,000 in punitive damages. On February 19, 2026, the court denied Tesla's post-trial motions, finding that "the evidence admitted at trial more than supports the jury verdict" (order). Tesla's appeal is pending in the Eleventh Circuit as No. 26-10858 (docket).

The verdict does not bind California courts and sets no value for any other claim. It shows that a jury can divide fault in a Level 2 crash between the driver and the company that designed the system.

Getting the car's data

A Tesla's own records often show what the driver and the system did. A 2023 Tesla Model Y owner's manual posted on NHTSA's website describes three sources. Features vary by model and software version.

• Event data recorder. The manual says it records "for a short period of time, typically 30 seconds or less" in certain crashes, including seat belt use, pedal use and speed, and that "Tesla may also access the EDR remotely in some crash circumstances."
• Vehicle logs. Modules record "braking, acceleration, trip and other related information," Autopilot components, speed and direction, and the data may be "periodically transmitted to Tesla wirelessly."
• Dashcam clips. Video is "saved locally to a formatted USB flash drive" and "Recordings are not sent to Tesla." The manual warns: "Do not rely on Dashcam to automatically record all safety-critical events."

Access is limited. Under Vehicle Code section 9951(c), data on a recording device the manufacturer installed may be downloaded only by the registered owner, or with the owner's consent, by court order, for anonymous safety research, or for service. The manual says Tesla shares vehicle data with third parties only in listed cases, including the owner's consent, a police request, a court order and use "as a defense for Tesla." California's privacy law also lets a consumer ask a business for "the specific pieces of personal information it has collected about that consumer" (Civil Code section 1798.110). If someone else's Tesla hit you, your lawyer asks the owner and Tesla to preserve the data and, if needed, seeks it through the case.

1. 1
   Keep the USB drive

   Remove the flash drive from the car and keep it as it is. Do not delete clips, reformat it or reuse it.

2. 2
   Hold the car

   Ask your insurer and the tow yard in writing not to sell, salvage or repair the car until its data is preserved.

3. 3
   Put Tesla on notice

   A written preservation request names the car, its VIN, the date, time and place, and asks Tesla to keep the event data and vehicle logs.

4. 4
   Get the police report

   Vehicle Code section 20012 requires the agency to disclose the report to people with a proper interest, including the drivers.

Our guide to evidence after a self-driving car crash and the crash checklist cover what to gather.

Filing deadlines

A lawsuit for injury or death caused by someone's wrongful act or neglect must generally be filed within two years under Code of Civil Procedure section 335.1, against the driver or against Tesla. A claim against a public entity, for example over a damaged guardrail or a broken signal, must first be presented within six months under Government Code section 911.2. The Mountain View report shows why: the NTSB tied the severity of the driver's injuries partly to unrepaired roadside equipment. We track both dates from the first call.

Situations outside this page

• A car with no one in the driver's seat. See our pages on Waymo accidents and Zoox accidents.
• Another brand's driver-assist system. The CPUC's order names Ford BlueCruise and General Motors Super Cruise as Level 2 examples. The driver comes first there too; our car accident page covers that claim.
• A Mercedes-Benz system with a DMV permit. The DMV lists Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America with a deployment permit limited to listed freeways, daytime and 40 mph. Our autonomous vehicle law page covers it.
• A death. Our wrongful death page and the guide to who can file explain the family's claim.

Next steps after a Tesla crash

A Tesla crash on Autopilot or FSD (Supervised) is a driver-assist case. The driver and the driver's insurer come first, and Tesla joins the claim when the evidence shows its design or warnings played a part. The work that shapes the claim happens early: keeping the USB drive and the car, requesting the data, getting the police report and tracking the two-year deadline.

If you were hurt, Wise Personal Injury & Accident Law, APC handles that work while you get treatment: we identify every driver and insurer, send the preservation letters and deal with the adjusters. Head injuries are covered on our brain injury page, and every self-driving car guide is listed on our self-driving car accident page. Josh Kohanim, Esq. is the firm's founder and trial attorney. Call (424) 235-7879, where Spanish-speaking staff answer the phone, or use the form. No fee unless we recover.