Tesla Owner Beats Elon Musk in Court to Claw Back $10,000 for FSD Lies
It turns out that paying ten grand for a feature that promises to turn your car into a fully autonomous robotaxi—but actually just panics at school zones—is a bad deal. And someone finally proved it in court.
Ben Gauaiser bought a Model 3 and paid a premium for the Full Self-Driving software package back in 2021. At the time, marketing hype and tweets promised that absolute autonomy was just around the corner. Instead, years passed, and his vehicle remained stuck at a glorified Level 2 driver-assist system.
The system constantly demanded manual takeover, randomly brake-tested traffic, and completely ignored speed limits in school zones. When customer service repeatedly blew him off, he decided to test the legal system instead.
Taking advantage of an arbitration loophole in Tesla's purchase contract, he filed a lawsuit in a Texas small claims court. The filing fee set him back exactly seventy-three dollars.
Tesla chose the classic corporate strategy of ignoring the lawsuit entirely, which resulted in a swift default judgment. The judge ordered the automaker to refund the full cost of the software plus taxes and legal fees.
To actually get his money, the owner had to get a writ of execution, authorizing local sheriffs to seize and sell Tesla property to pay off the debt. The threat of having a deputy wheeling out factory machinery finally forced the company to cut the check.
Meanwhile, Tesla recently quietly rebranded the software in China to "Tesla Assisted Driving" to avoid similar legal headaches.
Paying for future tech promises has officially become a high-risk gamble where the house doesn't always win. It is beautiful to see that sometimes, a simple seventy-three-dollar court filing is all it takes to make a multi-billion-dollar hype machine pay for its vaporware.
Source: Electrek
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