Tesla has its own “dieselgate”

Several Tesla electric vehicle owners have filed a lawsuit in a California court accusing the company of installing illegal software that they allege greatly inflates their expected range. The agency reported Reuters. The lawsuit could result in big reputational and financial problems for the company, as the plaintiffs have already invited the rest of the owners of electric vehicles to join the lawsuit.

The reason for the claim was investigation Reuters published last week. It claimed that Elon Musk, about a decade ago, ordered that the company’s engineers develop software that would display an overly optimistic range forecast on an electric car’s on-board monitor when the battery is fully charged. At the same time, as soon as the battery was discharged by half, the indicator of the expected power reserve began to fall rapidly. As a result, according to the plaintiffs, sometimes the actual charge consumption turned out to be twice as much as expected.

Realizing that displaying incorrect data can lead to the fact that the driver will not be able to correctly calculate the road to the nearest charging station, the company decided to “hide” part of the battery charge from drivers: even when a message about a zero charge level is displayed on the monitor, in fact, the driver still has about 24 km to get to the charging station.

In addition, faced with a wave of disgruntled customers who decided that something was wrong with the batteries in their electric vehicles, Tesla incentivized its employees to cancel as many customer visits to service centers as possible.

Usually those were informed that remote diagnostics showed the battery to be in good condition and there was no need to visit the service center directly.

“At the company’s Nevada office, some employees celebrated canceled appointments by muting their phones and hitting a metal xylophone, drawing applause from colleagues who sometimes stood at their desks. The team often canceled hundreds of appointments a week, and employees were judged by the average number of rescheduled appointments per day,” the investigation says.

The plaintiffs accuse the company of violating the terms of the warranty service, as well as fraud and unfair competition, since the overestimation of the expected range spurred Tesla customers to purchase electric vehicles from this particular company.

It is known that Tesla is not the only manufacturer of electric vehicles, which in one way or another can overestimate the expected range. In April of this year, the international organization SAE International, which unites auto engineers from around the world, published study, which showed that the range of electric vehicles is on average 12.5% ​​lower than that declared by manufacturers. However, both the Reuters investigation and the lawsuit note that the figures claimed by Tesla, even against this background, look less accurate.

In early January of this year, the South Korean authorities demanded from Tesla to pay a $2.2 million fine because the company did not adequately warn that electric vehicle range would decrease as temperatures dropped.

The current lawsuit reportedly does not specify the specific amount of compensation that the plaintiffs are seeking from the company. This is due, among other things, to the fact that, as the agency notes, the lawsuit is designed in such a way as to be able to represent the interests of all California-based buyers of the new Tesla Model 3, Model S, Model Y and Model X electric vehicles.

Neither after the publication of the Reuters investigation, nor after the lawsuit was filed, did Tesla representatives respond to the agency’s requests for comment on what was happening.

Kirill Sarkhanyants