State Attorney General Rob Bonta has Tesla in his crosshairs, and is aiming to temporarily suspend the company’s ability to do business in California, charging that Tesla’s “autopilot” and “full self-driving capability” claims are misleading bunk.

Ever since Trump returned to office, the discourse about electric carmaker Tesla has mostly concerned the Elon Musk protests at its dealerships, the company’s prodigious stock nosedive that has wrecked a Wall Street darling, and Musk’s entirety predictable break-up with Donald Trump after that bizarro Tesla marketing stunt on the White House lawn. All of that has pushed to the back-burner the very real concern that Tesla’s “full self-driving” mode is being wildly oversold, and has led to real-life car crashes.      

California Attorney General Rob Bonta is trying to get those “self-driving” concerns back into the discussion in a big way. The Chronicle reports that a state lawsuit against Tesla got underway Monday, and if the suit goes against Tesla, California DMV could suspend Tesla’s license to manufacture and sell cars in the state, for 30 days or longer.

NBC Bay Area is also at the Oakland courthouse where the trial started today, and has the very clever detail that Tesla critics placed “58 makeshift tombstones to signify the number of people who lost their lives in crashes involving Tesla's autopilot.”

Bonta’s lawsuit against Tesla is not new. It was originally filed in 2022, amended in 2023, and is just beginning court proceedings today. But the state’s case against Tesla is that they are significantly exaggerating when they use the terms “autopilot,” “full self-driving capability,” and claim that their system is “designed to be able to conduct short and long-distance trips with no action required by the person in the driver’s seat.”

And Bonta himself argued in a legal briefing last week that “These labels and descriptions represent specifically that respondent (Tesla)’s vehicles will operate as autonomous vehicles, which they could not and cannot do.”

Tesla attorneys respond that the automaker “has always made clear” that the cars are not fully autonomous, and require “active driver supervision” from a human being.

This new Oakland case is happening simultaneous to a separate trial in Miami where a 2019 Tesla Autopilot mishap is being blamed for killing one woman and gravely injuring her romantic partner.  

So what could come of this California trial? The Chronicle reports that in addition to Tesla being forced to pay monetary damages, the DMV could also “suspend Tesla’s licenses to manufacture and sell vehicles in California for at least 30 days.” So Tesla would still exist, but theoretically, their California manufacturing plants would be shut down for a month, and so would their dealerships. That’s not a death sentence, and the company would surely survive, but this would certainly make a bad year even worse for Tesla, and might lead to more similar state lawsuits.

Also, none of this bodes well for Tesla as it intends to launch its actually self-driving taxi service in the Bay Area — as Musk recently said, "in a month or two." The LiDAR-free Tesla models feature extra sensors and an upgraded version of the "full-self-driving" software, but the robotaxis, currently being tested with just a small group of users in Austin, Texas, have already been shown doing odd things out in the wild. But no injuries have been reported so far.

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Image: CORTE MADERA, CALIFORNIA - DECEMBER 20: A Tesla Cybertruck is displayed at a Tesla dealership on December 20, 2024 in Corte Madera, California. Electric car maker Tesla is recalling 700,000 vehicles over a tire pressure warning system that could fail to warn drivers of low tire pressure. 2024 Cybertrucks, 2017-2025 Model 3 and 2020-2025 Model Y are being recalled. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)