Peninsula Firm Sues Tesla Over Self-Driving Car Claims

BURLINGAME, CA — A Peninsula law firm has filed a proposed class action lawsuit against Tesla alleging the electric automaker mispresented autonomous driving features for which many customers paid thousands of dollars.

Burlingame-based Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy filed the lawsuit on behalf of plaintiff Briggs Matsko, a Central Valley man who paid $5,000 for a package of self-driving features that the lawsuit alleges failed to live up to the company’s claims, The Verge reports.

“As alleged in the complaint, people have relied upon the representations of TESLA that the self-driving capabilities are completely safe, when TESLA knew they had many problems,” plaintiff attorney Joseph Cotchett said in a statement.

The lawsuit alleges Tesla has since 2016 knowingly misrepresented the self-driving capabilities of its vehicles “to generate excitement about the company’s vehicles and thereby improve its financial condition by, among other things, attracting investment, increasing sales, avoiding bankruptcy, driving up Tesla’s stock price, and helping to establish Tesla as a dominant player in the electric vehicle market.”

The filing cites a 2016 announcement on Tesla’s official blog that “All Tesla cars being produced now have full self-driving hardware” that included a video of a Tesla ostensibly driving itself without incident, suggesting the company was on the brink of creating fully autonomous vehicle when Tesla and Musk knew it could not reasonably deliver on its promise.

The lawsuit alleges Tesla deceptively marketed its self-driving offerings in a video showing a person operating an autonomous vehicle in which the “person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not driving anything. The car is driving itself.”

But that video was doctored to exclude the Tesla crashing into a barrier, The New York Times reports.

The lawsuit follows complaints filed by the California DMV alleging Tesla exaggerated claims about the capabilities of its advanced driver assistance programs.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened 38 special investigations of Tesla crashes believed to involve ADAS that resulted in 19 deaths, Automotive News reports.

Tesla, which eliminated its media relations department in 2020, did not respond to a request for comment from Reuters in its reporting on Matsko’s lawsuit.

Tesla is already facing a separate lawsuit over a phantom braking issue, Reuters reports.

“Both the federal government and the State of California have very serious investigations going that as alleged in the complaint make this a very unsafe car,” plaintiff attorney Nabilah Hossain.