There are many layers to this story. Fundamentally it’s about Tesla having a dealer who was confused by Tesla.
…Bosplus, represented by Liu, admitted he’d copied the information about FSD capability from Tesla’s official website on to the advertisement for the vehicle and wasn’t aware it didn’t have it.
The CEO of Tesla has repeatedly boasted his cars are capable of self-driving, but the devil is in the details, obviously. The cars aren’t capable of self-driving.
Instead, the Tesla … matches speed to surrounding traffic and assists with lane steering, and … parallel parking, lane changes and navigating interchanges.
That’s a far cry from driverless, describing basic functions that are not much beyond what any other car can do in 2025. Certainly nothing there sounds worthy of a dealer price jump. Yet the buyers complained they wouldn’t have purchased the vehicle if they’d known it didn’t have “advertised features”.
I have to call bullshit on this.
Anyone buying a Tesla must know it doesn’t have its advertised features.
That’s the brand. It doesn’t deliver.
Moreover, this Tesla apparently had other hardware issues with “import” charging port limitations.
Tesla confirmed with the couple that their model could not be fitted with FSD. Tesla also confirmed that the car was a Japanese import and had a different charging port, which could be changed but would result in slower charging of its battery.
So the obvious questions are why couldn’t FSD be installed, and why couldn’t the import charging port be swapped with a non-import one?
These seem like serious design defects created by a low-quality manufacturer, rather than any fault of a dealer. After all, the CEO doesn’t differentiate in his fraudulent marketing, literally promising for years that all his cars have sufficient hardware to self-drive. Here he is in 2019 talking to investors (2:35:48):
Are we sure we have the right sensor suite?
Should we add anything more?
No.
Investors were told the cars could self-drive, had all the hardware they needed. And that was years after 2016 when the CEO very clearly and fraudulently flooded a gullible press:
Musk announced that all Tesla cars being produced as of today, including the Model 3, will have everything they need onboard to achieve full Level 5 self-driving in the future. The news means that every Tesla vehicle, including the Model S and X as well as Model 3 cars made after today will eventually be able to achieve full autonomous driving, with what Tesla refers to as “a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver” via nothing more than a software update at some point in the future.
[…]
Musk said in a conference call in August [2016] regarding Tesla’s advancements in creating a car with Level 4 autonomous capability that “what we’ve got will blow people’s minds, it blows my mind,” and added that “it’ll come sooner than people think.” He’s certainly delivered with today’s announcement.
Oh, yes, journalists. He has “certainly delivered” with that 2016 announcement that all the hardware was already installed and capable, making driverless a solved problem. Uh-huh.
Is the dealer accountable when it repeats a CEO’s lies? A judge ordered the buyer get a full refund. I suppose that’s one way of holding a CEO accountable, although it should go further. Fine everyone who works for him.