After a year of fighting out his case in arbitration, a Tesla owner successfully forced Elon Musk’s EV maker to reimburse him the $10,000 he paid for the company’s misleadingly-called “Full Self-Driving” driver assistance package, Electrek reports.
For over a decade now, Musk has made yearly promises that Teslas will be capable of driving themselves.
But the software, even after all these years, still requires users to be able to take over control at any time, making it no more than a middle-of-the-pack advanced driver assistance system.
A Washington-based Tesla owner and lawyer named Marc Dobin had purchased the FSD package for his wife’s third Tesla with the hope of maintaining her “independence as her motor skills declined,” he wrote in a blog post.
But after realizing the software’s ongoing limitations, Dobin took the company on for a chance to get his money back — and the judge sided with him, potentially setting an important precedent for other disillusioned Tesla owners who had spent thousands of dollars on an empty promise.
Dobin was startled by how woefully unprepared Tesla was for the hearing, which took place a year after he filed a demand with the American Arbitration Association.
“Tesla produced one witness: a Field Technical Specialist who admitted he hadn’t checked what equipment shipped with our car, hadn’t reviewed our driving logs, and didn’t know details about the FSD system installed on our car, if any,” he wrote. “He hadn’t spoken to any sales rep we dealt with or reviewed the contract’s integration clause.”
An in-house lawyer “sat silently,” he recalled, “while the company’s outside counsel tried to soften the blows of the witness’ testimony.”
Dobin “genuinely felt bad” for the field technical specialist, “because Tesla set him up to be a human punching bag — someone unprepared to answer key questions, forced to defend a system he clearly didn’t understand.”
Core to Dobin’s argument was that he and his wife were surprised by a previously undisclosed “safety score” requirement users had to pass to access a Beta version of FSD, which ended up getting waived long after Dobin purchased the add-on.
“Ironically, our insurance company, State Farm, had a telematics beacon that gave us high safety scores,” Dobin wrote. “Tesla’s opaque system never deemed us worthy. Despite careful driving, FSD, even in beta form, stayed locked.”
Even if Dobin’s wife had been able to unlock the software, it more than likely would’ve fallen far short of Musk’s infamously misleading promises about the feature.
“It was clear Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ was nowhere near autonomous,” Dobin argued.
Adding insult to injury, Musk admitted earlier this year that vehicles with the company’s HW3 on-board computer would never be capable of fully driving themselves. As Electrek points out, the carmaker has yet to clarify its plans to retrofit vehicles with a more capable HW4 computer, which has been in production since 2023.
“Considering the likely cost of Tesla’s outside counsel and internal time spent, the company probably spent far more than our refund defending a clearly indefensible practice,” Dobin wrote. “The math doesn’t math.”
While the lawyer pointed out that “arbitration awards are generally not considered precedent” and that “no class action” can technically be filed in a comment to Electrek‘s reporting, he said that “it may be likely that this case could serve as a roadmap for people who had a similar situation.”
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