A Tesla owner from California has filed a lawsuit against the automaker because of their deceptive claims about the two features: Full Self-Driving and Autopilot.
According to the complainant, Elon Musk is "misleadingly" marketing the said features, stating they are now usable.
However, several owners said they have already paid thousands of dollars for software that remains unready for commercial use.
Tesla Faces Class-Action Lawsuit Over FSD and Autopilot
According to a recent report by Mashable, Tesla is accused of creating deceptive claims about its driver assistance technologies.
The class-action lawsuit says that the company is engaging in misleading marketing of the features.
Additionally, Tesla has promised many times that its full-self driving capability will be available within a few months. However, none of them were achieved, and that's when the car owners complained about the overstatement.
Briggs Matsko, the plaintiff who pressed charges against the EV manufacturer, has reportedly paid $5,000 in 2018 in hopes of getting the Enhanced Autopilot system. This feature serves as a predecessor to the FSD feature.
Of course, this means he has spent an additional $15,000 for the add-on software of the Full self-driving package. Because of this, Matsko called out this bad marketing and decided to file a lawsuit in San Francisco.
False Promises
The Full Self-Driving function remains unfinished, although Musk claims that this feature will be implemented in 2018. The Verge reported that in 2019, the company boldly stated that it would deploy one million robotaxis with FSD technology.
The coast-to-coast drive that Musk promised was unfortunately put on hiatus at the time. Certainly, he is aware that it further needs some improvements before being commercialized.
The tech boss also mentioned that he would shift his focus to the safety side of Autopilot.
On the other hand, Tesla failed to deliver its "robotaxi" promise to the users.
The lawsuit includes evidence of fraud for FSD, as seen in the 2016 clip. The video shows an autonomous car leaving the garage and later moving on the streets until it stumbled on a parking spot. All of these things were done autonomously.
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FSD and Autopilot Pose Dangers
According to the Tesla engineers who previously worked for the company, the short footage was staged since the 3D mapped route was not yet released in any Tesla vehicles.
Apart from that, the lawsuit suggests that both Autopilot and FSD are dangerous to use. As an example, a Tesla Model X driver activated his car on Autopilot, but it crashed into a concrete block. The owner was killed in the act.
For Matsko, Tesla needs to be punished because of its continuous cycle of misleading marketing for its driverless features. For years, the company was given a chance to deliver the technologies to its customers, and yet, it always stalled.
This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by Joseph Henry