Court orders Tesla to buy back car from customer who thought Autopilot was like 'first time drunk driver'

A German court has ordered Tesla to buy back a Model 3 vehicle from a customer who filed a complaint about how disappointed he was with the full self-driving package – which includes Autopilot features – that he felt was “a Was driving like a “drunk before-time driver”.

Tesla is beginning to see growing pushback against its full self-driving package.

Since 2016, the automaker has been claiming that all of its vehicles are sold with the hardware needed to enable full self-driving, with future software updates that you can get if you buy full self-driving for $12,000 now. Buy driving packages.

Even after six years this has not happened.

Tesla tried to sweeten the deal by adding a few other features to the full self-driving package that are also connected to Autopilot, like Navigate on Autopilot, Auto Lane Change, Autopark and Summon. In Europe, things are more complicated as some of these features are closed due to local regulations.

Now, some Tesla owners are going to court to get reimbursed for the package because it didn’t live up to expectations. The automaker recently lost a case in Darmstadt Regional Court, which ordered Tesla to buy back the plaintiff’s Model 3.

Spiegel’s report on the matter:

As a result, assistance functions such as automatically overtaking slow vehicles on the freeway did not work. Steering behavior at entry and exit or motorway junctions is spongy and resembles that of a “drunk novice driver”. Traffic lights and stop signs are not recognized.

Tesla said the car has no faults and stressed that the features will be delivered via software updates in the future, but could not say when:

With regard to the procedure, the US group says it is not aware of any software or hardware malfunctions on the vehicle that could not be fixed by repair. According to Tesla, the required upgrade to the latest hardware would have been free. The systems and features work according to the existing rules for autonomous driving in Germany.

The automaker has appealed against the court’s decision.

CEO Elon Musk recently said he believes Tesla’s FSD beta is going to launch in Europe later this year, but that depends on regulatory approvals.

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