Anyone else thinking about going after Tesla for their FSD money?

I bought it three times... I now have it turned off to avoid the unexpected FSD experience after each upgrade. I'd be interested in knowing the process.

I'm sure you'll find yourself on Elon's personal shitlist and perhaps verboten from ever buying their cars again. Of course, if your cool with that but you don't have access to free legal services, you may not find yourself able to recover those funds as effectively.

That would be a bad move as it was something they charged for and didnt deliver, and to turn around and punish when someone asks for their money back… bad move when word gets out.

I would love to see tesla eat billions on this

Depending on the contract you signed, but most likely you can only try for abitration, not sue them

This seems like the easiest class action suit in history. I can’t imagine there isn’t one (or many) being put together.

Probably. Still going to poke around and see.

Arbitration clauses would prevent this, which is what I am lead to believe exist.

Bad move is selling a shitty product with sky high downstream liabilities for a decade. People who still buy now ought to be pretty well aware of the shortcomings of the company. I mean threatening you as a customer is kind of his thing. I'd expect him to be calling every person that gets a refund a pedo. Whether or not you'd want to hand that shit show any more money is kind of on you.

You could probably get the arbitration clause invalidated by the fraud perpetrated. Engineers admitted in court they faked the self driving promo video.

😂

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Not surprised. Autopilot shuts off before an accident so they can blame the driver every time. This company never takes responsibility for failure just like Elmo

!

They count every crash where Autopilot was engaged 5 seconds prior to the crash as a Autopilot crash

Tesla should eat billions on this. Musk lied over and over and over...

Too bad he hacked the us government and is now going to start his own party and try to rig the next election... you will then be forced to drive his shitty cars or get deported 🤣

Off topic: verboten, I’m German and I’m curious if this is another word that made it into the English language like Schadenfreude

Go for it. Think of all the suckers that leased a Model S or X back in the day and purchased FSD. What a waste!!

I have absolutely no idea how Tesla has so far avoided any large-scale payouts on this.   People paid $10k+ for FSD almost a decade ago and still haven’t received anything anywhere close to what was repeatedly promised by the CEO himself.   There are so many people who paid for this and won’t ever be able to utilize it because of hardware constraints or their cars just failing before FSD is available.   Honestly, if there’s any hope of consumer protection left in this country, Tesla needs to be sued into bankruptcy

Robot checkpoints with mars prisons

Arb doesn’t shield you from illegal activities.

He had all the pieces and even Waymo figured it out. Then he went all in against radar and wanted vision only. Imagine being a tech guy and turning your back on proven tech.

It's typically used informally as a variation of forbidden but English speakers find the German language as strict and harsh so calling something verboten is treated as extra forbidden. Given Elon's predilection for WWII German history and the far-right AfD, I felt it was apropos.

$10,000 from may 2015 is now $13,518 if you account for inflation

If enough people push for arbitration, Tesla may waive it and prefer a class action. Tesla have to pay for each individual arbitration hearing and it can become more expensive for them to deal with.

I'm American in Germany. Yes we use schadenfreude. I would not say it is widely used but in some circles absolutely.

“bUt iT sO uGlY”

He should be in fuckin' prison for the lies he's told again and again to shareholders and customers.

A lot of The tech folks outside the automotive industry that didn’t/don’t own teslas were flabbergasted by the idea of taking away a massive source of ground truth for the computers and still expecting the same experience. I admit when he first called lidar a fool’s errand, I couldn’t make up my mind if he was flaunting moores law on the price of lidar equipment and 3d labeling, or if tesla had an answer to that problem that I didn’t understand. *raises hand* I assumed the latter.

But it forces you to go through arbitration as the method of resolving disputes instead of class action

Be patient, should be ready November, er, maybe December at that latest.

My TSLA shareholder/fan friend and I got into a discussion over this. “How do you know he lied, those were just optimistic statements. He believed it was true at the time. He’s an optimist.” Philosophically and legally what is the difference? The best liars are people who believe their own lies (ask George Costanza). Would a lawsuit need to prove Elon didn’t actually think it was true?

Year 3245?

They already kind of have been, they’ve been paying to replace the hardware systems in cars over and over. At this point HW3 isn’t going to be good enough, and they don’t know how they’re going to be able to put a 4th gen in legacy models. It’s probably not billions but I wonder how much that’s costing them.

I expect a flood of arbitration cases…

Tesla has given deals to migrate FSD to newer cars for free, enough that a good number of people are not too unhappy with the result or at least they have something to look forward to. Some people are even happy to buy it twice. As with other cases of consumer abuse, it's not that easy to make enough people care enough to find a lawyer.

It definitely is appropriate

When it’s delayed this long, it’s not optimism, its false promises.

Also, when you paid a lot of money for it and didn’t get it… I mean at least people should get a refund.

You’re right. And it probably prevents class action arbitration as well, but an enterprising individual could stitch together a few hundred thousand (million?) cases and do mass arbitration. Tesla would have to settle just to avoid the hassle, fees, and negative publicity.

After a bit of reading up on this, they do hold even in cases of fraud, which this clearly is. They only don’t apply if the fraud was specifically related to hiding the arbitration clause itself. I think a flood of arbitration suits (mass arbitration not class arbitration) would get Tesla to agree to some kind of deal. They know they’d lose every one, and if there are a million of them, they’d have to do some kind of deal.

Fool me once, shame on you Fool me - you can't get fooled again You've got to understand the nature of the company we're dealing with

I don’t know. It’s not perfect, but newer teslas can drive places and navigate traffic without you touching the steering wheel, as long as your eyes are registered as paying attention. I wasn’t expecting to completely let go and let the car take over. I have an older Tesla with fsd and at one point, it was driving very well. The new updates have messed it up. But I do agree that we are not close to FULL SELF driving.

Now that would set up a class action, which is why they will fight it hard. Still worth trying though

Given that about 500k people bought this package... then if they bought it at the average price of $7000.... then Tesla could be on the hook for $3.5 billion. The irony is that those 500k people have, on average, put in years of unpaid work on this system through testing / training it. If each put in say... 200 hours on average... then there's 100 million hours. At $15 an hour, that's another $1.5 billion in labor. You could theoretically also consider the value lost in their cars for the mileage using them as testing instruments for Tesla. Alas, as it wasn't part of the contract, they did this all for free, and aren't entitled to any payback for their efforts.

so should Trevor Milton...

That's what happened in the Chipotle case; hundreds of stitched together arbitration hearings.

This is generally true (I'm no lawyer.) Typically class action is established by the courts because of a large number of concurrent civil claims, like in an airline crash, where the circumstances are all similar and the remedy would be similar. There is probably a good basis for a class action suit but I'd be willing to bet, that because of the arbitration clause, that there needs to be a decent number of existing arbitration claims to force the issue. I believe it would be very difficult to just start from ground zero with a class action suit. The devil is in the details, but as I am not a lawyer I can't really get down into the weeds. There is a process and a threshold that needs to be met in order to grant a class action.

Any day of the week now. As long as it doesn’t end in Y

Do it.

Good news! Tesla has offered *a free FSD upgrade* for your next Tesla! /s

Two weeks

Yeah people tend to forget that a contract doesn’t allow people to do illegal things. Like people think if you sign an nda you automatically can’t say anything about work. Even though tesla has illegal working conditions people think they can’t speak up and that’s the craziest part to me.

> they charged for and didnt deliver, From my understanding, Tesla lost a civil suit 15 years ago, and thus changed the contractual writing that FSD is autopilot with advanced navigation. Then more recently are selling it as FSD supervised. So the beta likely meets this definition. This loss was about a guy who never got into the beta due to his safety score. Elon promised much more, but contractually, most people are in a gray zone, as to what was legally promised vs what was provided (assuming they got into the beta.)

How about the people that put down huge deposits on roadsters hahahhaa

Apparently your friend's argument doesn't reflect what the arbitration standard is for an undelivered service. At what point does optimism from the CEO become fraud? Due to the early hardware the plaintiff's car could never be FSD. They only added "supervised" in 2024, before that it was "beta" which is misleading. Guarantee they booked that FSD revenue too.

Anyone that isn’t is crazy in my mind. The man sold you something that doesn’t exist. A refund is the minimum you should get back imo.

Class actions suck for the consumer. You’ll end up getting 20$ or something like that out of it and the lawyers walk away with a huge pot of money.

It should not matter. Tesla was not able to fulfill its contractual obligation and now it has to make you whole.

You can sue in small claims for little or no cost to yourself, your car might mysteriously start failing though...

Next year, it is always next year.

He already claimed to provide updates for HW3 computers. Probably to avoid getting sued for claiming HW3 would be enough for FSD. But even HW4 is having trouble coping with the FSD and HW5 is being promoted by end of this year.

Yea, what is the arbitration standard? If they book revenue from a promised feature, and they set the expected date via tweet, is that a hard promise? At what point does the law say that they stole from you? For me this is at least deeply unethical and I’d be really pissed if I paid thousands for something I never got. Of course some TSLA investors cut him a lot of slack because they made a lot of money on the stock. I know they wouldn’t give the same leeway to any other CEO because he’s not a visionary genius.

So what was the “contract” all these years regarding FSD? Elon eliminated Tesla’s PR team and replaced them with his tweets. Did Tesla give other statements in black and white on your FSD purchase agreement about when it would work as he promised, or did peoplepay all that money based solely on his tweets? And now is the trick to prove that his tweets are contractual obligations, or is that pretty much settled?

Because he is CEO in a publicly traded company, it doesn't matter where he says it, and he's made these promises directly in earnings calls. It's stock manipulation. The arbitration standard was that Tesla said HW2 won't be adequate for unsupervised FSD, they didn't offer to upgrade that to current HW4 for millions of cars, HW3 is only supervised, so they have to return the money. Tesla sent 2 lawyers and a very unqualified tech to the deposition (on purpose so he couldn't answer technical questions that would be obviously in plaintiffs favor). There is an article in r/law, Tesla is fucked if they have to upgrade nearly everything sold to date to HW4 to even get close to unsupervised.

Fraud is actually okay in the U.S.A. 2025. It's just business.

I am not a lawyer but I suspect in litigation there would be something like a “reasonable person” test along the lines of, “would a reasonable person with access to Tesla’s engineering data have known that FSD wasn’t likely to be released within 18 months?”

a tasty lawsuit salad!

I'm British in the UK and someone sent me a text with schadenfreude in it today ..

That's $30,000 to $45,000 for software that you don't use?

> I'm sure you'll find yourself on Elon's personal shitlist and perhaps verboten from ever buying their cars again just wear it like a badge of honour

This rabbit hole goes very deep. I was a Tesla fan, and bought the first model 3, then traded it for a Y, then traded that for a newer Y. I didn't want to lose the FSD, so I added it to each model. Afterall, it was almost ready to go...

Execute update 66

The point isn't about how well their drive assistance is working. The point is that they demanded additional money for future FSD features, very much advertised as the full deal and never delivered. And the question is, why aren't people demanding that money nackt, as they never got what they paid for.

I bought my 2018 Model 3 in May 2024 with paid FSD from a third party dealer. I’m not sure where I fit into this situation 😅. I would gladly take the $8k if offered.

In the matter of shareholders investing it doesn't matter if he lied because they have "forward looking / optimistic" clauses in their prospectus. But as far as buying a product that does not arrive he has no argument. It doesn't matter if he lied or if he was just being a lunatic, you paid for it and did not receive it, and can demand a refund.

and the stock will go up 5%

In cases of fraud against the government the official legal standard is ["knowingly and willfully"](https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual-910-knowingly-and-willfully). In particular, this standard does not require specific actual knowledge as seen here: "A defendant is not relieved of the consequences of a material misrepresentation by lack of knowledge when the means of ascertaining truthfulness are available. In appropriate circumstances, the government may establish the defendant's knowledge of falsity by proving that the defendant either knew the statement was false or acted with a conscious purpose to avoid learning the truth. See United States v. West, 666 F.2d 16, 19 (2d Cir. 1981); Lange, 528 F.2d at 1288; United States v. Clearfield, 358 F. Supp. 564, 574 (E.D. Pa. 1973). Proof that the defendant acted with reckless disregard or reckless indifference may therefore satisfy the knowledge requirement, when the defendant makes a false material statement and consciously avoids learning the facts or intends to deceive the government. See United States v. Schaffer, 600 F.2d 1120, 1122 (5th Cir. 1979)." Reckless disregard for the truth or falsity of a statement is sufficient to meet the standard of "knowingly". The actual standard law and precedent dictates is that you must have taken reasonable care to find real evidence for your claims before making them.

Silly, Mars isn't going to be the prison. Earth is.

The difference is intent. If you know something to be false, but say it anyway as if it’s true, then you intentionally lie. But if you say something that you believe to be true, but later find out it was false, then you didn’t lie intentionally (but was just wrong about something). Regarding FSD, if Tesla is contractually obligated to deliver the working feature to a customer, but ultimately fails to do so, then it could be held liable for the breach of contract. That is regardless if Elon lied or was just wrong due to being too optimistic.

HW4 is not nearly towards max capacity as you claim, the next big update for HW4 will be 4.5x larger they announced, it’s not coping.

But remember in 2018…FSD is just 6 months away!

You are probably not the only one.

*Yes.*

Make sure to collect your interest on it as well

Yes, I bought a 2019, have since sold it but am wondering if I can get my 9k back

Doesn’t matter if he “thought” it was true. He was the CEO of the company, telling all of us it was going to work in the next year. CEOs and companies are responsible for their actions, not their thoughts

The contract was “your car will be able to eventually fully drive itself with this feature”. I agreed to the sale, paid money for that feature, and I am due my car eventually being able to fully drive itself. If my car can never fully drive itself, then they broke their side of the contract. Furthermore, I was convinced of its functionality at the time of my purchasing it by a video that was later proved to have been edited to misrepresent its capability as being better than it was.

You’d spend more in lawyers. Need a class action

This will break the Camel's back.

see also Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. and she is in prison.

The thing being, essentially Tesla didn't show up, the person they sent was grossly unprepared. We need a case where Tesla has done their homework for this to really take off.

Yeah! I will go for it as well. Kinda gave up on it long time ago but this gives me hope. Good luck to you and us others 👌🏼

Ask your friend, would he accept promises from a pharmaceutical company for a drug that made you lose weight with no adverse consequences, fir which you paid $10k 10 years ago, and still haven't seen the magic pill that works? Or, a plane maker that promised an autonomous plane that needed no pilot, met all the safety regs, for which you paid, say $100k ,over ten years ago? If he is being honest, the answer is NO! Eli Lily , Pfizer etc wouldn't promise that for the pill. Neither would Boeing, Bombardier etc bc they know it can't be done, safely. That's they key modifier, " safely " . It's actually not that hard to develop a vision system that can move a car around in perfect conditions. But, doing so in all weather, all temps, all environments, without hurting others, is an entirely different proposition.

Absolutely you should do it. Need to do it before you sell the car.

I know exactly what he’d say: but it’s Elon, he’s got such an amazing track record it’s ok if he’s wrong sometimes. I would add that my friend didn’t buy the FSD when he got his Tesla.

And 30k if you just put it in the s&p

Ask you friend if he is saying Elon is stupid, because if he didnt lie, he was stupid.

Tesla had to cover the arbitration fees, since arbitration was their own idea .