Seems like a pretty clearcut case of false advertising, but IANAL. Anyone care to explain it to me?
In: 0
IANAL, but what aspect does it not do as far as driving is concerned? It steers, accelerates, brakes, give signal indications and even navigates.
It isn’t PERFECT driving that is guaranteed to 100% never get into accidents or get directions wrong – but neither are 99.9999% of the human drivers out there.
Because it is full self driving. If you’re referring to how it makes you keep acting like you’re driving, that’s because the law requires that. It’s not actually legal for the car to be fully autonomous and like let you sleep while it drives.
Therefore it is full self driving in terms of what is technologically and legally possible
There’s a grey area between legal definitions and marketing.
A couple of previous examples would be Subway advertising their “foot long sub” despite it being shorter than a foot, or the AT&T / Sprint case a few years back that advertised “5G e” which was actually just rebranded 4g and they only updated the icon in the status bar.
I don’t remember how either of those cases went, but one of the primary arguments in both were that the labels were marketing terms.
In your example (and [looking at their own explanation](https://www.tesla.com/support/autopilot#:%7E:text=Yes.,it%20make%20a%20car%20autonomous)) the most likely argument Tesla could make is “self driving” is a marketing term, people confusing their marketing with being autonomous is not their problem.
Personally I think it’s a shady practice, but it also took no effort to find their literature saying it’s not autonomous. Unlike the other examples, I really cannot fault them for someone not doing that tiny bit of research before spending way too much on one of their cars.
https://www.tesla.com/support/autopilot
They clearly state that it is a beta. That is why. If that aspect wasn’t included, then they could indeed open themselves up to a lawsuit.
Latest Answers