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Elon Musk's electric car company, Tesla, was sued on Wednesday in a proposed class action that said the company lied about its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving features.
The complaint said that since 2016, Tesla and Musk have been misleadingly advertising the technology as working or "just around the corner" even though they knew that the technology did not work or did not exist and made vehicles unsafe.
Briggs Matsko, the named plaintiff, said that Tesla did this to "create excitement" about its cars, get investors, boost sales, avoid bankruptcy, drive up its stock price, and become a "dominant player" in electric cars.
Matsko said, "Tesla hasn't made anything even close to a fully self-driving car yet."
People who bought or leased a Tesla with Autopilot, Enhanced Autopilot, or Full Self-Driving features since 2016 are asking for unspecified damages in a lawsuit filed in federal court in San Francisco.
Tesla didn't answer right away when asked for a comment. In 2020, it got rid of its media relations department.
The lawsuit came after California's Department of Motor Vehicles filed complaints on July 28 saying that Tesla lied about how well its advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) worked.
There could be consequences, like taking Tesla's license away in California and making them pay back drivers.
Tesla has said that Autopilot lets cars steer, speed up, and slow down while staying in their lanes, and Full Self-Driving lets cars obey traffic lights and switch lanes.
It has also said that both technologies "require active driver supervision" from a "fully attentive" driver with both hands on the wheel and "do not make the vehicle autonomous."
Matsko from Rancho Murieta, California, said that he paid an extra $5,000 for Enhanced Autopilot on his 2018 Tesla Model X.
He also said that Tesla drivers who get software updates "act as untrained test engineers" and have found "many problems," such as cars that steer into oncoming traffic, run red lights, and don't turn when they should.
Since 2016, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened 38 special probes into Tesla crashes where ADAS was thought to be a factor. In these crashes, 19 people were killed.
