The promise was "Your car will be able to drive itself without anybody in it." There is an implied promise that this will happen within the time one expects to own the car.
Sure. I think there's a perfectly reasonable (and legally useful) argument to be made there.
But even if there is, the remedy would be a refund (potentially with interest or penalties)- not "Let me transfer to another car"
We're also not quite there yet.
There are people who have been waiting five years
...well, almost 5.... Oct 19th 2016 is 5 years from when they announced it as available for purchase.... so close enough-- still a bit shy of the average length of new car ownership though.
And no driverless software yet in sight.
Depends on who you ask.
Folks in this section run the gammut from:
driverless is unpossible!
to
Robotaxis coming this year!
I suspect it's somewhere in between myself
A quick google search says that on average people keep new cars for six years. A lot of folks won't get what they paid for.
I'll be moderately surprised if nobody has filed a suit over this exact thing once the oldest FSD cars get beyond average age. As I say I certainly think there's a reasonable case to be made at least on this.
Course those are $3000 refunds, not 10k... (plus at least interest)
(I got what I paid for: EAP, which I bought because it existed, and it's the best thing since sliced bread. As someone else --sorry, I don't remember who-- called it: Supervised Self-Driving. And I'll amend that to Supervised Highway Self-Driving since EAP is really not good for city driving.)
I bought EAP too of course, pre-req for FSD.
Mainly I bought FSD based on 3 things:
The promise it'd cost more later (excepting that weird 2 week sale in 2019 that's been true)
and
I knew I'd get any needed HW upgrades free (which has also proved true)
and
I believed the system would be capable of at least L3 highway. I still do, though obviously the SW isn't there yet. I think if vision-only solves the stopped-partly-in-lane issue then the SW IS probably there though. They technically owe me L4 almost everywhere, but I'd be perfectly happy with l3 highway.
I had my last car for 11 years (a Lexus IS350, purchased new)- so I've got a bit of time yet. And not like the last 18 months have had a lot of driving in em anyway.
Best car on the road! Too bad Elon has to take money from people on a promise he cannot keep.
The most legally relevant question would be did he believe he could keep it when he made it?
If so the most he's on the hook for is that 3k I mentioned (plus interest) if he ends up finding he can't deliver.
If subpoenas found internal docs showing another story it might be a different situation.