Tesla’s legal woes keep piling up | David Booth

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Another week, another investigation into the machinations of Elon Musk. Seriously, were it not for Donald Trump, Lord Elon might well be the most pursued man in America. And, just like his brother-from-another-mother, this latest legal snaggle is all about the misappropriation of funds, more specifically that the American Securities Exchange Commission and federal prosecutors are now looking into whether Tesla corporate monies are being used to build a private palace — supposedly right next door to the company’s Austin, Texas headquarters — for its CEO.

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Now, like most, I fully expect Musk to skate on this one. The SEC has a poor track record in hounding Mr. Musk. If they couldn’t get their man on what looked like a slam dunk — the “funding secured” tweet case — there would seem to be precious little with which they’ll nail him on this one.

It might be worth remembering, however, that very similar charges landed then-Nissan-CEO Carlos Ghosn — he was accused of using corporate funds to build homes in Rio de Janeiro, Beirut, Paris, and Amsterdam — in a Japanese jail for almost 13 months, and that he remains a fugitive in Lebanon some three years later. Perhaps, if the United States had a functioning legal system, Musk might get fined or convicted.

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Ditto for the — my gosh, has it been three weeks already? — reports of Model 3 range exaggerations, the Wall Street Journal reporting on August 30 that federal prosecutors are following up on the Reuters report that claims Tesla, under Mr. Musk’s personal direction, deliberately coded its range estimators to overstate the distance its cars could travel on a single battery charge.

This one really lit up the comment section — “Everybody’s doing it,” and “It’s only one media outlet,” being the common defences from acolytes — and, sadly, as Trump is proving, public opinion seems to have an outsized effect on legal prosecution these days. So, again, I don’t think he’s going to take a fall on this one.

More problematic — as in, he might not beat this rap — are the litigations, investigations, and prosecutions piling up against Tesla’s Autopilot self-driving system. Controversial almost from the beginning of its 2015 introduction, Tesla’s self-driving efforts are now the subject of vast streams of investigations and lawsuits that all seem to be coming to a head at once.

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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), for instance, is looking into why Tesla has allegedly programmed a software change that allows drivers to keep their hands off the steering wheel for longer when in Autopilot. This latest probe — revealed August 29 — stems from collisions between Teslas and stationary vehicles, most notably first responders’ cars and trucks. The nexus would seem to be whether extending the time between driver interactions is wise when Autopilot can’t even recognize the danger of flashing red lights.

Meanwhile, Reuters says the American Department of Justice is investigating Tesla “over claims that the company’s electric vehicles can drive themselves.” The news agency says that, according to sources, the DOJ’s investigation “could conclude with criminal charges against the company or individual executives.” The legalities of calling your product “Full Self-Driving” are, of course, yet to be determined — especially since Mr. Musk continues to assert, at least officially, that the driver must remain in charge of the vehicle. Those warnings were good enough, in fact, for a jury in Los Angeles to dismiss a lawsuit predicated on similar claims.

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There might be some chance of losing some of these legal shenanigans—most certainly, the court of public opinion is not in his corner

Nonetheless, the moniker could prove problematic. Were Tesla simply calling its system “Self-Driving,” the company might defend itself with the wiggle room of never quite specifying how much “self-driving” it’s promising. The addition of the “Full” qualifier would seem to quash that defence. And considering that millions have been lost in legal battles over the simple misplacement of commas, the difference would not seem one of simple semantics.

California’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) is also accusing Tesla of “deceptive practice” as a result of its advertising of autonomous driving which, according to Reuters, could result in the DMV suspending Tesla’s license to sell cars in the Golden State, a disaster of incalculable proportions. According to the allegations, Tesla “made or disseminated statements that are untrue or misleading, and not based on facts,” and Autopilot-equipped Teslas “could not at the time of those advertisements, and cannot now, operate as autonomous vehicles.”

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As for Tesla’s “the driver is in charge defense,” The Verge says the DMV will counter with Tesla’s Autopilot page claiming that its FSD system “is designed to be able to conduct short- and long-distance trips with no action required by the person in the driver’s seat.”

Meanwhile, the first of multiple lawsuits over Autopilot accidents is about to get underway in California in mid-September, Reuters noting that Micah Lee’s Model 3 suddenly left a Los Angeles highway at 105 kilometres an hour and burst into flames after hitting a palm tree. A different suit in Florida — set to start in October, says the news agency — stems from another Model 3 hitting a tractor-trailer at a highway intersection in the Sunshine State in 2019. There are more — a class-action suit involving false advertising is still active — but just the above should be enough to keep Tesla’s already overworked legal team in billable hours for years to come.

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More importantly, there might be some chance of losing some of these legal shenanigans. Most certainly, the court of public opinion is not in his corner. Oh, there’ll be no dissuading the Teslarati that FSD is the second coming. But the fact remains that Tesla Autopilot — and, more importantly, fully autonomous automobiles — have failed to catch on with the general public.

While Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) — essentially partial self-driving systems — are well-accepted, consumers continue to be skeptical about ceding control of their cars to a robot. And today’s angst about artificial intelligence is unlikely to improve the popularity of full self-driving.

Even in the most progressive city in North America, San Francisco, city councillors’ decision to allow Waymo and Cruise self-driving taxis loose on city streets full-time has resulted in the Safe Street Rebel group upping its “coning” protests — surrounding a self-driving car with parking cones — so the offending vehicles are essentially “bricked.” Nor are San Francisco’s police and fire departments any happier. According to missionlocal.org — an independent news organization in San Fran’s Mission district — there’ve been no fewer than 55 “unusual occurrences” where self-driving cars have impeded firefighters’ rescue efforts.

Whether or not this rejection of autonomous automobiles continues — or even if it affects any of Tesla’s legal woes — it seems like we are reaching some sort of inflection point for the future of self-driving. That’s not to say that fully self-driving vehicles will not be a reality in some distant future, but it feels like predictions of complete automotive autonomy in the near future may well rest on the litigations, investigations, and prosecutions piling up against Tesla.