The Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency booked 80 people on October 27 for switching on Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software in cars that South Korea has not cleared to run it. Officers also seized 21 of the aftermarket devices behind the activations. Police describe it as the largest enforcement action so far against a kind of hardware workaround that has spread across China, Europe and Korea over the past year.
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The charge is a violation of the Motor Vehicle Management Act, which carries up to two years in prison or a fine of up to 20 million won, roughly $15,000.
A small module on the CAN bus
According to Electrek’s account of the case, the suspects either imported unlock modules from Europe and China or built their own. The modules plug into the car’s CAN bus, the internal network that carries commands between components, and bypass the regional software lock that keeps the feature switched off. One suspect plugged a European-made unit into his own Tesla. An IT worker assembled his device using information he found on GitHub. Police also said the group swapped advice online about unlocking the software and about stopping the car from keeping a record that it had been activated.
Tesla had already moved against the hardware. In April, owners in Europe, South Korea, China and Turkey reported that their cars were woken remotely, scanned for unauthorized CAN bus devices and stripped of the feature, reverting to basic Autopilot. The modules were described as costing about 500 euros. In China, owners who used the devices received in-car notices of permanent bans, and their paid packages were reset to standard Autopilot. Tesla also called the devices a cybersecurity threat. It emailed affected owners that they were “100% liable for any accident” and that warranty repairs could be refused whether or not the device caused the damage.
Which Teslas can legally run the software in Korea
Tesla launched the supervised version of the software in South Korea in late 2025, and only on cars built in the United States: the Model S, Model X and Cybertruck. Those vehicles are exempt from Korean safety certification under the Korea-U.S. free trade agreement. The Model 3 and Model Y sold in Korea ship from Giga Shanghai and have not cleared Korea’s safety standards for the feature, which is where the demand for a workaround came from. Korea classifies the supervised system as Level 2 driver assistance, so the law treats the vehicle as an ordinary car and puts accident liability on the driver rather than the manufacturer. A police official said at the time that simply not holding the wheel is hard to call a safe-driving violation, but that a driver who fails to intervene when the system malfunctions may face punishment. The feature was priced at 9,043,000 won, about $6,200, when the rollout reached Korean owners, with regulators stressing that responsibility for any crash lies entirely with the person behind the wheel.
How many Teslas qualify depends on whom is asked. Carisyou Data Lab, cited by the Korea JoongAng Daily, counted 47,458 of 229,311 Teslas on Korean roads, or 20.7 percent, as eligible as of August. Government data released in May by lawmaker Park Yong-gap put the figure far lower: 4,292 of 180,684 registered Teslas, or 2.4 percent, made up of 2,708 Model X, 1,193 Model S and 391 Cybertruck. Neither source explains the gap, which likely reflects different fleet baselines and counting dates, and the difference matters because it sets how many owners had a legal route to the feature and how many did not.
What police say they confirmed
A police official told the Korea JoongAng Daily that “safety risks were confirmed,” pointing to the chance that the software misreads driving conditions in a car whose sensors and approvals were never validated for it. Police call the practice “jailbreaking” and say it threatens road safety. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport asked police to investigate in April after finding signs of unauthorized activation, and officers are consulting both the ministry and the Korea Transportation Safety Authority on technical questions. The investigation is continuing, so the 80 may not be the final count.
The naming of the product is under pressure elsewhere. Germany’s Federal Ministry of Transport said on October 6 that the old name was misleading because the system does not take over the full driving task, and Tesla now sells the European package as Tesla Assisted Driving. The American name is unchanged. Tesla offered the change in September talks with Transport Minister Steffen Bilger, and Germany agreed to back a 10 percent speed-over-limit cap in the EU approval process, which would force Tesla to change software that often exceeds it. Tesla lists eight approved EU countries, Germany not among them, and the bloc-wide vote has slipped to December at the earliest, so the grey market for unlock modules exists partly because official approval keeps moving.
Electrek’s reporting carries no statement from Tesla about the Seoul case, and the open commercial question is one the outlet raises itself: whether Tesla will refund Korean owners of Chinese-built cars who paid more than $6,000 for a feature their vehicles may never be permitted to use.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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