My experience taking Tesla to court about FSD

[MrBadger]

The regulations are a red herring and imho cannot be used as an excuse. There is nothing in the regulations that I can see tat would prevent Tesla from implementing a significant and highly useable proportion of FSD should they desire. As above by @edb49, certain scenarios may not be implemented, but a significant amount could be. The lateral forces aspect is also complete herring too. The lateral forces allowed by the regulations are sufficient that if properly implemented, short of racing around the streets, they would not be a significant limitation. The issue is that the current UK implementation, Tesla either allow the car to career straight into situations where speed should be curtailed to avoid the issue and make a more comfortable ride for the occupants or, the implementation of steering around a curve will potentially break limits when on the edge because its rocking around the corner (straight line then pronounced turn) rather than smoothly steering.

I am sure, and have had enough feedback to know that, even a limited implementation (fully within the regulations) of what is in FSD beta would satisfy the needs of many. Whilst regulations may prevent Tesla achieving 100% of what their FSD beta delivers, its only their will that is preventing them from delivering a very useful 9x% of it. Whilst in the mean time other manufacturers are delivering say 50% of it, but its the 50% of it that many are finding brings most benefit to them.

 

[TestPilot]

Does anyone who purchased FSD separately in 2019 recall any terms and conditions separate

This is not the case, while the relevant UNECE standards for ALKS and Lane Changing don't specify which roads it can be used on, it is specifically not allowed to cross lanes without following the defined driver confirmation and timings. This makes it impossible for the car to pick a lane at a roundabout for example. You would also find that the maximum permissible latteral acceleration would mean driving very slowly.

i would accept level 2 with lane change confirmation as having met “Automatic driving on city streets.”

 

[GRiLLA]

Thanks GRiLLA, this is helpful.

There's no reason that a manufacturer with FSD couldn't take UNECE standards into account. e.g. At the moment Tesla stops at traffic lights regardless whether they are red or green. And if FSD actually 'existed' there's no reason it couldn't disengage at a roundabout. And key to the whole litigation against Tesla is that none of this FSD was anywhere close to delivery by 1st Jan 2020.

P.S. I have a Model X too and I remember when the lateral G limits were implemented in AutoPilot, so it would slow itself down on corners/ask you to take over when previously it didn't. Shows that Tesla have got a track record of adjusting the AP system to regulation, and if they had a working FSD system by Jan 2020 then I'm sure they'd do the same.

Arguably we already have something that does that with the current autopilot, it will lane keep on any road with marking and hand back to you whenever the regulatory requirements are exceeded, however that's pretty much all the time in an urban environment.

I think we all acknowledge that FSD will need to handle stop lines, traffic lights, lane choosing etc. As it stands the vehicle type regulations for the UK do not allow this. Neither Tesla or anyone else can build self-driving without an exception (granted for testing).

Tesla are far from the only people developing self driving, all are limited by the current laws. Have a look at Wayve's videos of their solution being tested on London streets.

 

[GRiLLA]

Does anyone who purchased FSD separately in 2019 recall any terms and conditions separate

i would accept level 2 with lane change confirmation as having met “Automatic driving on city streets.”

No, you misunderstand, there are specific timing requirements for a lane change, and gaps required that simply could not happen in an urban sceanrio

 

[TestPilot]

Oh I do understand, as the same requirements make automatic lane changes entirely unsuitable for U.K. motorways too in my experience. But that’s not the point. Just because it’s impractical, doesn’t stop Tesla delivering it in a limited form in beta, as they have on motorways.
Anyway. I don’t want to argue with you, I have enough arguing to do with Tesla.

 

[TestPilot]

The regulations are a red herring and imho cannot be used as an excuse. There is nothing in the regulations that I can see tat would prevent Tesla from implementing a significant and highly useable proportion of FSD should they desire. As above by @edb49, certain scenarios may not be implemented, but a significant amount could be. The lateral forces aspect is also complete herring too. The lateral forces allowed by the regulations are sufficient that if properly implemented, short of racing around the streets, they would not be a significant limitation. The issue is that the current UK implementation, Tesla either allow the car to career straight into situations where speed should be curtailed to avoid the issue and make a more comfortable ride for the occupants or, the implementation of steering around a curve will potentially break limits when on the edge because its rocking around the corner (straight line then pronounced turn) rather than smoothly steering.

I am sure, and have had enough feedback to know that, even a limited implementation (fully within the regulations) of what is in FSD beta would satisfy the needs of many. Whilst regulations may prevent Tesla achieving 100% of what their FSD beta delivers, its only their will that is preventing them from delivering a very useful 9x% of it. Whilst in the mean time other manufacturers are delivering say 50% of it, but its the 50% of it that many are finding brings most benefit to them.

Exactly this.

 

[GRiLLA]

As above by @edb49, certain scenarios may not be implemented, but a significant amount could be.

Please give one example of something that Autopilot doesn't do already but you think would be allowed under current UNECE regulations or UK type approval.

I assure you there is very little relevant to 'city street' driving that would be allowable. For example absolutely nothing that would need an indicator to be turned on would be allowed, so you are not going to get far.

 

[MrBadger]

Please give one example of something that Autopilot doesn't do already but you think would be allowed under current UNECE regulations or UK type approval.

I assure you there is very little relevant to 'city street' driving that would be allowable. For example absolutely nothing that would need an indicator to be turned on would be allowed, so you are not going to get far.

Since autopilot is only designed for divided highways with controlled junctions and non cyclists or pedestrians, ie motorways and dual carriage ways, I can think of many scenarios where use outside that would be possible within regulations, not require use of an indicator and be incredibly useful to many. City streets is really a but of a misnoma. Its really 'non divided highways with controlled junctions'. There are literally thousands of miles of roads that would benefit from FSD beta perception and planning, yet would not be affected by any regulations, and this would also include highways too and better implementation of functionality, including NoA and even basic autopilot.

I could drive from here to west country in 3 hours using roads which are not designed for autopilot and probably need to use indicator a max dozen times, if that, all of which existing fsd stop line control partially handles so the car is already aware of ace scenario.

But your right, it would struggle going 5 minutes down the road to the shops so let's just blame the regulations for not allowing my 3 hour drive where regulations would have next to no impact other than the poor current implementation of some features and other fully compliant features that we don't have in UK implementation.

 

[qwickshot]

Since autopilot is only designed for divided highways with controlled junctions and non cyclists or pedestrians, ie motorways and dual carriage ways, I can think of many scenarios where use outside that would be possible within regulations, not require use of an indicator and be incredibly useful to many. City streets is really a but of a misnoma. Its really 'non divided highways with controlled junctions'. There are literally thousands of miles of roads that would benefit from FSD beta perception and planning, yet would not be affected by any regulations, and this would also include highways too and better implementation of functionality, including NoA and even basic autopilot.

I could drive from here to west country in 3 hours using roads which are not designed for autopilot and probably need to use indicator a max dozen times, if that, all of which existing fsd stop line control partially handles so the car is already aware of ace scenario.

But your right, it would struggle going 5 minutes down the road to the shops so let's just blame the regulations for not allowing my 3 hour drive where regulations would have next to no impact other than the poor current implementation of some features and other fully compliant features that we don't have in UK implementation.

I can’t say I agree.

Most ‘A’ roads have corners that autopilot would either have to slow to a crawl to get round or would be required to disengage before approaching to keep within the regs. They also have uncontrolled junctions and roundabouts all over them.

Even some ‘A’ class dual carriageways have corners on them that the regs don’t allow autopilot to go round at full speed because they are too sharp and break the cornering force regulation. The A12 through Essex which is a major trunk road has a couple of nasty bends which cause autopilot to reduce speed and occasionally hand back control because it breaks the limits of UNECE regs.

 

[GRiLLA]

Since autopilot is only designed for divided highways with controlled junctions and non cyclists or pedestrians, ie motorways and dual carriage ways, I can think of many scenarios where use outside that would be possible within regulations, not require use of an indicator and be incredibly useful to many. City streets is really a but of a misnoma. Its really 'non divided highways with controlled junctions'. There are literally thousands of miles of roads that would benefit from FSD beta perception and planning, yet would not be affected by any regulations, and this would also include highways too and better implementation of functionality, including NoA and even basic autopilot.

I could drive from here to west country in 3 hours using roads which are not designed for autopilot and probably need to use indicator a max dozen times, if that, all of which existing fsd stop line control partially handles so the car is already aware of ace scenario.

But your right, it would struggle going 5 minutes down the road to the shops so let's just blame the regulations for not allowing my 3 hour drive where regulations would have next to no impact other than the poor current implementation of some features and other fully compliant features that we don't have in UK implementation.

You keep saying 'many' but don't give any examples.

 

[MrBadger]

You keep saying 'many' but don't give any examples.

I take you have never driven an A roads that are not divided with controlled junctions. There are several thousand miles of these roads that would benefit from the enhanced features of non highways aka city streets beta that would not fall foul of the regulations that you say prevent the use of FSD beta in this country.

You only need to look at a map to see that MANY hundreds of miles or more of these roads (they are the red coloured ones) would fully benefit from FSD beta and a small number of sections would have some minor limitations of which even UK FSD beta handles MANY of those scenarios.

As in my earlier post, I could drive over 3 hours to the West Country and probably encounter 12 or less situations where regulations would prevent full FSD functionality and the majority of those (off top of my head I can think of probably two that wouldn’t) that could be handled gracefully in similar way to existing stop line control does.

There are some scenarios where lateral force may be a slight limitation. Twisty roads might benefit from a slightly increased 4ms2 lateral force to maintain full speed on the tightest minimum radius corners but the tightest radius are not recommended to be used so these would be few and far between. On my 3 hour journey I can think of two corners that probably meet this criteria and would result in slight slowing that would probably still be much faster than what a car towing a caravan could comfortably traverse.

Putting lateral limit into perspective, at around 70mph by my schoolboy maths that's roughly a 320m radius. Now measure the radiius of a typical motorway intersection and compare that with the actual road speed and it’s easy to see why MANY have 40 or 50mph limits. 3ms2 is not such a massive limitation in MANY situations.

But hey, let’s just let the strive for no limitations prevent the un restricted use of it on 9x% of roads where one would spend significant periods of time simply driving from A to B along roads where current UK implementation is not designed to be used.

But I’m never going to win the argument that 90% of something is better than nothing all the while that some think it should be 100% of FSD beta or nothing. Tesla clearly side with the latter.

 

[Js1977]

But I’m never going to win the argument that 90% of something is better than nothing all the while that some think it should be 100% of FSD beta or nothing. Tesla clearly side with the latter.

TLDR- No you won't win the argument because its your opinion and your applied percentages... It's just a discussion, you dont need to WIN the argument and imho why should you?.... everything you mentioned is subjective and you really need to get over it

 

[TestPilot]

Let’s all chill please. I hardly ever use this forum but it always seems when I do it’s like this. Not a great place.

 

[edb49]

Tesla owners demand refunds after £5,800 ‘driverless’ technology was never delivered

Unhappy customers take action as ‘self-driving’ feature is plagued with repeated delays

www.telegraph.co.uk

I thought this was interesting from the article:

Dan Kerrigan, group litigation specialist at Harcus Parker, a City law firm, said Tesla was “obviously in real difficulties”.

“It’s just straight forward. You’ve bought something that you haven’t got. It’s obviously lamentable that they have been as aggressive as they have.”

 

[Pagemakers]

Can somebody cut and paste the Telegraph article here. If you don’t subscribe to the newspaper, you can’t read the story.

 

[speedyranger74]

Can somebody cut and paste the Telegraph article here. If you don’t subscribe to the newspaper, you can’t read the story.

 

[spdpsba]

hardly ever use this forum but it always seems when I do it’s like this. Not a great place.

May be your expectation of the forum is akin to Tesla bashing and suing then you at times may find this ‘not a great place’ - FB page may be the right one.

 

[Seeds369]

I'll start with a really quick summary. I bought a Model 3, taking delivery in July 2019 and paying £5800 for the FSD extra. My view was that Tesla had failed to deliver on the contract with how they described FSD at the time, and so I ended up taking them to court for £5800 plus interest and costs. Just before the court hearing was about to take place, Tesla settled with me, the core of the settlement being:
- FSD removed from my car, e.g. just standard Autopilot
- Tesla paying me a little over £8000

That's the summary, if you'd like to hear more read on! I posted a thread earlier this year (February) to find out if anyone had previous experience suing Tesla about FSD:

Has anyone sued Tesla for FSD costs?

I took delivery of a Model 3 with the FSD box ticked on the first day of UK deliveries, 20th June 2019. Reservation made 18th October 2016, and I think my order speccing the FSD was made 1st May 2019. (Would need to check notes on that last thing.) It's coming up to 4 years since I've had the...

teslamotorsclub.com

No one was able/willing to come forward with their experience, so this post is to help others out who were in the position I was.

I took delivery of my Model 3 in the first batch on 20/06/2019 - I think this may have been the first day for delivery. I had ticked the FSD option, which was £5800 on the order agreement. When ordered my Model 3 I was pretty excited about FSD - they were saying the city streets feature was going to be ready by the end of 2019, and had posted the video of a Model X navigating to the Tesla facility and parking. Clearly, history shows they were miles away from delivering on their claim.

After considering this, I thought there was a clear legal claim that I had. The basis of the claim was Consumer Rights Act 2015 (“CRA”), section 11(1), which states:

The Tesla website during 2019 described the goods as follows:

Because I ordered my car from Tesla directly, e.g. their website, any description they used then formed part of the contract - this was the basis of my claim.

The timeline of my interaction with Tesla/the court was as follows. I have attached some of the documents to this post, but redacted my address/car reg/VIN. (I have left in the claim number and my claim - I don't feel the need to redact those.)
2023-02-21: I sent the "Letter Before Action" which set out the legal basis for my claim before starting court action [Doc attached]
2023-03-07: Tesla replied, essentially denying my claim
2023-03-07: I issued court proceedings via the Money Claim Online website, a cost of £455 [Two docs attached]
2023-04-05: Telsa filed their defence which admitted the very thing I was claiming on!
2023-06-07: The court proposed to allocate this to the Small Claims track
2023-06-09: I filed the allocation questionnaire and requested the claim was heard at my local court
2023-08-08: The proceedings were transferred to my local court
2023-10-10: The court set directions (e.g. when witness statements should be exchanged)
2023-10-12: The court set a hearing date of 17th Nov
2023-10-16: Tesla sent a settlement offer... this then led to some to and fro which I'll set out in more detail below
2023-10-27: I signed a revised settlement offer (Tesla had already signed it)
2023-11-02: Two payments received in my bank account; £5,800.00 and £2,215.22

It seems to me like Telsa's desire to settle was triggered by the court hearing date being set. Their initial settlement offer had three things I didn't like in it:
1) They only offered £5800 - but if I was successful in court I would get 8% interest on this amount from 1st Jan 2020 to the judgement, as well as court fees.
2) There was a "non-advice" clause, that I wouldn't help anyone with a similar claim to mine.
3) There was a confidentiality clause, that I wouldn't be able to discuss with anyone about the settlement.

I happened to be on my emails when Tesla's first offer came in, so I replied within two minutes with a rather cheeky email:


Anyway, after the tone had been appropriately set...! I decided to deal with the financial aspect, so I wrote back to Tesla to tell them that I thought I'd be successful in my court claim and essentially they'd have to pay the full value of the claim.

They then responded on 17th Oct with a new settlement agreement at the higher financial value I required, but £285.75 short. (They had the full amount of the claim that I issued, but my claim also had interest accruing at £1.27 per day.) I then came back to them in two emails to make a few changes:
- Add the £285.75 to the settlement amount
- Tidy up the legal language
- Remove the "non-advice" clause
- Remove the confidentiality clause

They came back to me saying they accepted most of the amendments but wouldn't remove the non-advice and confidentiality clauses.

Quite simply, I wasn't going to sign anything that put me in handcuffs and restrained what I could do. I would prefer to go to court and lose. I saw these two positions as impossible to meet in the middle - e.g. Tesla had said they're not removing the non-advice and confidentiality clauses, but I said it was a requirement for the settlement for them to do so. I didn't respond to their latest settlement offer and then on 24th Oct I had a follow up email saying they hadn't heard back from their 20th Oct email. (The 20th Oct one had the full financial value I was after, but kept the non-advice and confidentiality clauses. I replied saying:



This led to them removing the two clauses, and we then proceeded to sign the settlement, they asked for my bank details and then made payment/removed FSD from my car.

By way of commentary, I think my claim was an absolute slam-dunk from a legal POV. Their defence had set out they intend to deliver city street driving in the future; therefore they hadn't delivered it by the end of 2019 which was what their website claimed they would do. The website was the description used to sell the car, and so the website formed part of the contract - very clear breach of contract.

From Telsa's POV, I am the worst type of litigator to take on. I am not a lawyer, but deal with them quite often in my day job so I know enough to put in a small claims action with confidence. The money wasn't important to me, I felt they'd conned me and I wanted them to do the right thing and put it right. Moreover, because the money wasn't important to me I was never going to sign up to a non-advice/confidentiality clause, I think it's important that my experience is out there for others to form their own views from.

There's lots of other detail I could put into this post, but I thought these were the interesting points. Happy to answer any questions!

Well done sir, unlike you I don’t have the knowledge to just take them to court and only got as far as asking them for a refund which was refused, I think I will now revisit this. Thank you for sharing your experience with us all and congratulations for standing your ground and winning your case

 

[Seeds369]

I’m so close to doing the same as the OP. Great post BTW.

Me too

 

[KennethS]

My personal view is Tesla has charged quite a substantial price and not delivered on what was promised (choose whichever term you feel appropriate) to induce people to purchase the option. On our 2019 M3P there was no offer at the time or order of EAP and it was FSD as the only choice. But it was offered at a relative discount for those who took it early at pre-order. On our 2022 MYLR, there was a choice of EAP or FSD and we took EAP since we do find some of the additional features of some value. Because we keep our cars until the end of their useful life, I'm not yet ready to commence proceedings for a refund on the M3P. On the MYLR we pretty much knew what we were getting when purchasing EAP so I don't really feel aggrieved. But I can certainly fully understand why people feel they should be refunded and Tesla is wrong to be putting up the fight.