Since 2016, Tesla has said that its future electric cars will have the necessary equipment for autonomous driving. However, the company has not yet fulfilled its promise, and some car owners doubt Tesla’s ability to implement this idea. Which led to the lawsuit.
In September, Tesla car owners filed a class-action lawsuit against the automaker for “misleading the public about Autopilot technology and Fully Self-Driving (FSD) features.” The company filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit last week with a brief comment:
“Failure to realize a long-term desired goal is not cheating.”
The term “long-term aspirational goal” is very careful to describe the automaker’s ubiquitous touts of fully autonomous driving. But such an approach can make it difficult to make a positive decision on a driver’s claim. Owners of Tesla cars must prove that the company intentionally misled customers into thinking they were buying vehicles that would become self-driving; and prove that Tesla knew they would not be able to fulfill the promise.
The automaker has never really given a specific time frame for achieving its goals. The CEO of the company, Elon Musk, announced the year 2016, but later postponed the deadline several times.
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The FSD beta was launched in October 2020 and, according to the latest publicly available data, currently has more than 100,000 registered participants from Tesla owners worldwide. Today, Tesla cars come standard with autopilot. For an additional $15,000, owners can purchase the Full Self-Driving option. Musk has promised that the feature will one day provide fully autonomous capabilities, but today FSD still involves the driver taking control of the car while driving. Tesla claims that 160,000 customers have now purchased FSD.
Tesla’s motion notes that the lawsuit itself demonstrates that the company is currently working toward the goal of self-driving.
“To the contrary, the allegations demonstrate that Tesla is constantly improving its driver assistance technology (ADAS) by releasing software updates with the goal of achieving greater and better autonomous capabilities in the future.”
Tesla also cited several comments made by the company and CEO Elon Musk that warned there would be challenges bringing autonomous driving to market.
“Furthermore, Tesla has made it clear from the start that it will be a ‘significant period of time’ before true self-driving is approved by regulators.”
The company concludes its argument by saying that the lawsuit “does not specify a specific timeframe that Tesla promises to release fully autonomous capabilities to the general public.”
In parallel with lawsuits from customers, the US Ministry of Justice is conducting its own investigation into Tesla’s promises. Also in August 2021, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation into a series of accidents – one of which was fatal (when a Tesla equipped with Autopilot crashed into parked ambulances). Administration officials stepped up their investigation in June, which covers 830,000 Tesla vehicles with Autopilot and 16 accidents involving electric vehicles, as well as stationary emergency response and road service vehicles.
Source: Electrek
