Elon Musk certainly knows how to get attention. At the 2025 Tesla Shareholder Meeting today, he made a bold claim that speaks to his confidence in Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software, saying it will allow owners to “text and drive” in “a month or two”.

This is the kind of statement that makes you pause and scratch your head. On the surface, it sounds like Tesla’s software will soon be capable enough to deal with the task of driving that means drivers could take their attention off the road. Of course you could do anything with your time away from supervising the car, using your phone is just the most obvious.

Using your phone while driving is clearly illegal, but that doesn’t stop millions doing it everyday, driver assistance or not. In some circumstances, Tesla FSD owners will disengage the software and use their phone, so the software monitoring doesn’t yell at them for doing so (and risk a strike).

If you admit defeat, that people will try to use their phones when behind the wheel, then having driver assistance is certainly safer than not having it, but when you condone this as a company, you need to take responsibility for what may happen when your software is operating the vehicle.

If Tesla make this step, with FSD V14.2.x, I expect they will do their best to alert the driver when they need to take over, but this will certainly occur with short notice, meaning it’s not practical for humans to recalibrate from focusing on their phone, back to what’s happening in the surrounding environment, then make an appropriate action to respond in the blink of an eye.

This means the only realistic way this gets supported is for Tesla to take liability if an accident was to occur while FSD is being used. To mitigate the risk of expensive law suits claiming Tesla is responsible, Tesla needs to be incredibly confident that accidents are incredibly rare.

Now here’s the reality. As much as Tesla may have the technology ready to go before the end of 2025, they need the cooperation and agreement of law enforcement who currently policy texting and driving laws. Regardless of how safe it becomes to text and drive using FSD, drivers won’t get a pass, simply because you’re in a Tesla, this needs to be endorsed by autorities.

When it comes to insurance, Tesla offers their own product for Tesla owners in some states and they may chose to leverage data to determine fault, however 3rd parties who insure Tesla owners, won’t simply accept a driver pointing the finger at Tesla and if Tesla doesn’t formally accept responsibility, an accident could see owners texting and drivers quickly finding they are uninsured.

Nearly every state in the US prohibits text messaging for all drivers, covering 49 states plus the District of Columbia and several territories. These bans are primarily enforced, allowing officers to pull over violators without needing another offence. Only a handful have secondary enforcement, meaning another violation must occur first.

Around 33 states and the District of Columbia ban handheld cellphone use entirely for all drivers, making hands-free options the only legal way to communicate. This includes territories like Puerto Rico and Guam, with most allowing primary enforcement. Alabama and Missouri stand out with secondary enforcement, but the push is towards stricter hands-free rules for easier policing.