This is ugly. Hope they haven’t realized to much of that FSD money yet. I wonder how big the bill will be if they have to return all the FSD money.
In a class-action lawsuit, customers say they were duped by Tesla's $15,000 Full Self-Driving feature. Company lawyers say failure isn't fraud.
www.latimes.com
They won't have to return all, or even most, of the FSD money, regardless of outcome here.
As discussed repeatedly here and elsewhere, there's been 2 different things Tesla has sold as "FSD"
Pre March 2019 they sold what would be at minimum L4 capabilities, arguably L5.
But they only (depending when you bought) charged 3-5k for it, and at this point the majority of buyers would be after this was no longer being sold.
After March 2019 they sold what was explicitly never promised to be more than an L2 product during the sale (auto driving on city streets- which already exists as an L2 product in FSDb)-- and it was sold for a much higher price (currently 15k) and sold to more people as even with a lower take rate for the higher price there were simply far more people buying Teslas since then.
The language change again as oft discussed seems pretty obviously intended to address exactly these sorts of future legal concerns.
The post march-2019 folks, once they've got city streets at L2, are made whole and "owed" nothing further legally. They might well GET more if Tesla can offer >L2 on their vehicles, but legally Tesla wouldn't owe it to them.
The pre-3/19 buyers are still owed something... which is why I don't expect Tesla to recognize ALL deferred FSD revenue, only the post-3/19 stuff, with city streets goes to legit wide release in any given geo. But it's a relatively small amount at this point. And FWIW some owners have already gotten refunds on this via small claims (check out the FSD forum for some discussion of that fact-- though I'm unclear how Tesla handles those refunds accounting-wise).