Tesla responds, says missing long-term goals isn’t fraud

IT House News on December 8, Tesla defended itself in a lawsuit filed by a user about its self-driving car, saying that “merely failing to achieve long-term, aspirational goals is not fraud.”

In September, a Tesla owner filed a class-action lawsuit against Tesla, alleging that Tesla “allegedly misled the public about its Autopilot, Enhanced Autopilot, and Full Self-Driving (FSD) technologies.”

Since 2016, Tesla has claimed that all vehicles it produces have “all the hardware needed” to enable self-driving through future software updates. However, the automaker has yet to deliver on its promises, and the aforementioned lawsuits have emerged over the past few years as some owners have grown suspicious of Tesla’s incompetence.

Last week, Tesla filed to have the suit dismissed and made a rare comment about its lack of self-driving technology. In the motion to dismiss, Tesla argued that its failure to meet its goals did not constitute fraud, saying “merely failing to meet a long-term, aspirational goal is not fraudulent.”

It will be difficult for car owners to win the case. They need to prove that Tesla deliberately misled customers into thinking that they were buying a vehicle that would be self-driving. It would also need to prove that Tesla knew it couldn’t deliver on its promises, which could be difficult to do.

IT Home understands that Tesla has never made a commitment to the specific time to achieve this goal, but its CEO Elon Musk has said that Tesla will achieve self-driving in 2020, but this goal has not yet been reached. Been delayed several times.

In its motion to dismiss, Tesla argued that the indictment instead shows that Tesla has been working toward the goal of self-driving.

Instead, the allegations in the indictment suggest that Tesla has been continuously improving its ADAS technology by releasing software updates with the goal of enabling more and better self-driving capabilities in the future.

Tesla also referred to some comments by the company and CEO Elon Musk that constituted a warning that bringing self-driving technology to market would be problematic.

Additionally, Tesla has made it clear from the early days that there will still be a significant time gap, with considerable variation across jurisdictions, before regulators will approve true autonomous driving.

“The indictment does not identify a specific timeline for Tesla’s promised release of Full Self-Driving to the public,” the company said at the end of its argument.

Still, it’s at least an acknowledgment of Tesla’s failure to meet its self-driving goals.