— A Tesla Autopilot lawsuit alleges customers have been deceived and misled about advanced driver assistance systems Autopilot and Full Self-Driving capability.
Tesla owners pay thousands of dollars extra for these features just to allegedly be used as "untrained test engineers" to test self-driving software on public roads.
According to the Autopilot class action lawsuit, several automakers have more advanced autonomous technology than Tesla even though Tesla promotes itself as the self-driving leader.
The Tesla Auopilot lawsuit includes:
"All persons who purchased or leased from Tesla, Inc. (or any entity it directly or indirectly owns or controls, including but not limited to Tesla Lease Trust and Tesla Finance LLC) a new Tesla vehicle with 'Autopilot,' 'Enhanced Autopilot,' or 'Full Self-Driving Capability' (collectively, 'Class Vehicles') at any time from January 1, 2016, to the present ('Class Period')."
California plaintiff Briggs Matsko purchased a new 2018 Tesla Model X and paid Tesla an additional $5,000 for the Enhanced Autopilot version of Tesla’s advanced driver assistance system (ADAS).
Tesla allegedly represented its ADAS technology would make the Model X fully self-driving in some situations and would soon make it fully self-driving in all situations.
"It is now four years later, and Tesla has never provided Plaintiff anything remotely approaching the fully self-driving car it promised to provide." — Tesla Autopilot lawsuit
The Autopilot class action references the 2016 launch of Enhanced Autopilot and Full Self-Driving technology when engineers allegedly produced a video which shows a vehicle driving itself.
The video begins with the following message:
“The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not driving anything. The car is driving itself.”
But the lawsuit alleges the employees who made the video later admitted the car in the video had a lot of help from commercial mapping software that wasn't available to customers. Even then, the Tesla allegedly didn't drive well and ran into a fence during filming.
"With the assistance of a large team of Tesla engineers, the car had to run the same route over and over again before Tesla got acceptable video that appeared to show a car capable of driving itself. Even though the video was debunked as deceptive and misleading years ago, Tesla continues to prominently feature it on its website." — Tesla Autopilot lawsuit
The plaintiff says it's now been six years and there are still no Tesla self-driving cars. There are allegedly only “updates to its experimental FSD [Full Self-Driving] Beta software to a small minority of Tesla owners" who report various problems.
Those problems allegedly include vehicles that fail to make routine turns, cars that run red lights and vehicles that steer directly into large objects and oncoming traffic.
The Tesla Autopilot lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California: Briggs A. Matsko v. Tesla, Inc., et al.
The plaintiff is represented by Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, LLP.
