Tesla FSD 2025: Cybertruck Gains, Mad Max Mode, Regulator Heat

A Cybertruck Refresh Meets a Software Reckoning

Tesla's 2025 Cybertruck update brings the expected hardware polish—refined aerodynamics, upgraded battery chemistry, and performance tweaks aimed at making the angular pickup more competitive against rivals entering the electric truck market 1. But the more consequential story around Tesla this year isn't sheet metal or range figures—it's what's happening inside the software stack that controls how the truck, and every other Tesla, drives itself 1.

Mad Max Mode and the Push for Speed

Earlier this year Tesla rolled out its most significant Full Self-Driving update in roughly twelve months, introducing a feature nicknamed "Mad Max" mode that lets vehicles travel meaningfully faster than posted speed limits 2. The update has drawn outsized attention precisely because it inverts the industry's usual safety-first messaging, prioritizing aggressive, confident driving behavior over conservative caution 2. Tesla's AI leadership has defended this direction: AI chief Ashok Elluswamy has argued that FSD should learn each driver's preferred pace organically rather than impose a hard speed ceiling, calling manual maximum-speed controls an "anti-pattern" that works against how the system should ultimately behave 7. That philosophy—let the model adapt to the human, not the other way around—runs through much of Tesla's recent messaging about where FSD is headed.

Bold Claims, Real Risks

Elon Musk has amplified the sense that FSD is approaching true autonomy, at one point claiming the latest update effectively allows drivers to text behind the wheel—a claim that collides directly with laws in most states that still require attentive human supervision of semi-autonomous systems 6. That tension between marketing bravado and legal reality surfaced dramatically in an incident involving an Uber driver who reportedly slept for roughly twenty minutes on a highway while FSD completed the trip, a story that split public opinion between admiration for the technology and alarm at the behavior it seemed to encourage 4.

Regulatory Scrutiny on Two Continents

In the United States, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration closed its investigation into Tesla's Smart Summon feature after finding only minor crashes, though broader FSD safety probes remain open and are expected to continue into 2026 8. In Europe, scrutiny has taken a different shape: Dutch regulator RDW approved FSD four months ago and has pushed for its EU-wide adoption, yet at Tesla's request it has kept the underlying safety data confidential, drawing criticism from transparency advocates and other outlets covering the same standoff 35.

The Hardware Ceiling

Perhaps the most consequential admission came from Musk himself: millions of existing Tesla vehicles built on Hardware 3 will never receive true unsupervised FSD, because the chip simply lacks the computational capability 9. That acknowledgment complicates Tesla's broader narrative of continuous software improvement, suggesting that owners of older vehicles—including some Cybertrucks—may be permanently capped at supervised, Level 2 functionality no matter how far the software evolves. Together, these threads show a company racing to demonstrate autonomy while regulators, hardware limits, and public skepticism increasingly shape how far that race can go.