Tesla Sued Over Autopilot, FSD Claims

Elon Musk’s Tesla has been hit by another lawsuit, after the EV maker allegedly misled the public by falsely advertising its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving features (FSD).

Specifically, the complaint accused Tesla and Musk of having since 2016 deceptively advertised the technology as fully functioning or “just around the corner”, despite knowing that the technology did not work or was nonexistent, and made vehicles unsafe, Reuters reported.

It comes Tesla was ordered in July by a court in Germany to refund a customer over problems with the Autopilot system. The court upheld the woman’s complaint that her car’s Autopilot was defective after a technical report showed the vehicle did not reliably recognise obstacles and would at times activate the brakes unnecessarily.

Deceptive claims?

Meanwhile, over in the United States a proposed class action has been filed this week in the US District Court (Northern District of California).

According to Reuters, a plantiff named Briggs Matsko, said Tesla allegedly made these misleading statements (about Autopilot/FDB) to “generate excitement” about its vehicles, attract investments, boost sales, avoid bankruptcy, drive up its stock price and become a “dominant player” in electric vehicles.

“Tesla has yet to produce anything even remotely approaching a fully self-driving car,” Matsko is reported to have said.

The lawsuit apparently seeks unspecified damages for people who since 2016 bought or leased Tesla vehicles with Autopilot, Enhanced Autopilot and Full Self-Driving features.

Tesla did not immediately respond to requests for comment – hardly surprising since the world’s most valuable car maker disbanded its media relations department in 2020.

Reuters noted this lawsuit followed complaints filed on 28 July by California’s Department of Motor Vehicles accusing Tesla of overstating how well its advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) worked.

Remedies could include suspending Tesla’s license in California, and requiring restitution to drivers, Reuters reported

Driver systems

Tesla has said Autopilot enables vehicles to steer, accelerate and brake within their lanes, while Full Self-Driving lets vehicles obey traffic signals and change lanes.

But Tesla has also said that both technologies “require active driver supervision,” with a “fully attentive” driver whose hands are on the wheel, “and do not make the vehicle autonomous.”

According to Reuters, Matsko of Rancho Murieta in California, said he paid a $5,000 premium for his 2018 Tesla Model X to obtain Enhanced Autopilot.

He also said Tesla drivers who receive software updates “effectively act as untrained test engineers” and have found “myriad problems,” including that vehicles steer into oncoming traffic, run red lights, and fail to make routine turns.

Investigations, lawsuits

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has since 2016 opened 38 special investigations of Tesla crashes believed to involve ADAS. Nineteen deaths were reported in those crashes.

Indeed, Tesla vehicles have accounted for nearly 70 percent of reported crashes involving advanced driver-assistance systems since June 2021, according to federal figures released in June, but officials warned against drawing any safety conclusions.

It should be remembered that in August 2021 the NHTSA had launched a formal investigation of Tesla’s Autopilot, after a series of high profile fatal crashes.

Then in June this year, the NHTSA upgraded its investigation of Tesla’s Autopilot, which is the step taken before the agency determines a recall.

Tesla has also had to deal with other lawsuits over its Autopilot system.

For example in September 2021, five police officers in Texas sued Tesla after they, and a police dog, were ‘badly injured’ after an unnamed driver crashed his Tesla Model X into the back of two parked police cruisers at 70mph (112kph), after they had stopped to investigate a fourth vehicle for suspected narcotics offences.

The driver was drunk and had used his Tesla to drive him home, when it crashed and wrecked the police cars, and left the police officers with “severe injuries and permanent disabilities.”

Over hyped?

Musk has aggressively hyped Tesla’s driver assistance system (Autopilot) and self-driving technology for years now.

CNBC reported that in late 2016, Musk promised Tesla fans a self-driving car that’s capable of driving from Los Angeles to New York without “the need for a single touch” by the end of 2017.

Then in 2019, Musk raised billions of dollars for Tesla by promising investors the company would have 1 million “robotaxi ready” cars on the road by the end of 2020.

In July 2020, Elon Musk said that Tesla was “very close” to achieving level 5 autonomous driving technology.

Level 5 is the holy grail of autonomous driving technology, as level 5 vehicles will not require human intervention, and need for a human drivers is eliminated.

Indeed, it is said that level 5 cars won’t even have steering wheels or acceleration/braking pedals.

These cars will be free from geofencing, and will be able to drive anywhere, and do anything that normal car with a human driver can do.

Tesla cars currently operate at a level-two, which requires the driver to remain alert and ready to act, with hands on the wheel.

Driver attention is certainly still required.

Previously engineers at influential US magazine Consumer Reports (CR) demonstrated how easy it was to defeat the Tesla Autopilot driver monitoring system.

Consumer Reports said its engineers easily tricked a Tesla Model Y so that it could drive on Autopilot, without anyone in the driver’s seat – a scenario that would present extreme danger if it were repeated on public roads.

In July this year the man who led the development of Tesla’s Autopilot driving assistance system left the EV maker.

Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s Director of AI and the leader of the Autopilot Vision team, announced on Twitter that he had resigned. He revealed he had no other job lined up, prompting speculation if his departure was voluntary.

Karpathy’s departure followed the closure of a Tesla office in San Mateo, California, where data annotation teams were helping to improve the company’s driver assistance technology.