Tesla owner wins ~$10k settlement over Tesla’s full self-driving claims
A Tesla owner in the UK challenged Tesla over its failure to deliver on its full self-driving claims and won a settlement representing a refund of his purchase cost of FSD, with interest, after filing a claim in small claims court.
Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system has been available since 2016, with Tesla stating at the time that all Teslas now have the hardware to fully drive themselves. The system went on sale that year as a $3,000 option, though prices have shifted up and down over time.
But the software… still doesn’t work. While Tesla finally released FSD beta to everyone in the US last year (after gating it behind a “safety score” for about a year), Teslas are still not actually capable of fully driving themselves.
Tesla’s system is still “level 2” on the SAE’s driving automation scale, which means responsibility lies with the driver. Drivers need to pay attention to the vehicle, and should, since FSD can make some pretty dangerous decisions.
The system has raised eyebrows with regulators, lawsuits, and political campaigns all claiming that Tesla advertises the system falsely by calling it full self-driving when it is not.
FSD Beta does deliver on some specific promises that Tesla made – namely, traffic light recognition and automatic driving on city streets. While the latter is not available unsupervised, it has been rolled out to customers – in North America, anyway. FSD Beta has only started being available in a few other territories outside North America earlier this year.
But the UK is not one of those places, and 2023 is not 2019. Which is the source of the claim we’ll be discussing today.
The claim was filed by Tesla owner Edward Butler, who detailed the process in a thread on Tesla Motors Club forum.
Butler purchased a Tesla Model 3 in 2019, along with the Full Self-Driving option at a price of £5800 (about $7,100 USD at today’s rates). He alleged that Tesla has not delivered on specific promises related to its Full Self-Driving option, and thus breached the Consumer Rights Act of 2015. His claim asked for a refund of the price of the system, with interest, and a rollback to eliminate FSD functionality for his vehicle.
Specifically, he cited Tesla’s website which in 2019 stated that traffic light recognition and automatic driving on city streets were “coming later this year.” Since Butler purchased the vehicle entirely from the website and without a test drive, the website description formed part of the purchase contract.
Since then, Tesla has delivered traffic light recognition in the UK, though that feature rolled out in September 2020, after Tesla’s self-imposed deadline. And Tesla has still not yet delivered automatic driving on city streets in the UK, nearly four years later.
Butler notified Tesla of his intent to file, and initially the company denied the claim. Then he filed with the UK courts’ Money Claim Online website, and his case was assigned to his local small claims court.
Once a court date was set, Tesla offered Butler a settlement offer – but initially, that settlement only included a refund of the initial price of the system, with no interest. And worse, for Butler, Tesla added clauses that would restrict him from talking about the settlement or providing anyone else instructions on how to pursue a similar claim.
Butler objected to these restrictions, and told Tesla that he would not accept any claims with these clauses included. After some further back and forth and telling Tesla that he would continue to pursue the court date, Tesla seemingly recognized that his claim was a “slam-dunk,” in Butler’s words, and agreed to the higher amount without the gag clauses included.
Butler says:
From Telsa’s POV, I am the worst type of litigator to take on. I am not a lawyer, but deal with them quite often in my day job so I know enough to put in a small claims action with confidence. The money wasn’t important to me, I felt they’d conned me and I wanted them to do the right thing and put it right. Moreover, because the money wasn’t important to me I was never going to sign up to a non-advice/confidentiality clause, I think it’s important that my experience is out there for others to form their own views from.
The settlement ended up being for £8,015.22, including interest and court fees, which is $9,860USD at today’s exchange rates. As a settlement, this does not set any legal precedents, but it does show that there is a strong case against Tesla, at least in the UK, over violation of UK law in its advertising claims.
Electrek’s Take
This isn’t the first time Tesla has been lost in court over false advertising relating to its self-driving system. Last year, it was ordered to upgrade one driver’s self-driving computer for free after announcing that it would charge owners $1,500 for hardware they already bought.
But small claims is not the most efficient way to hold companies accountable when they make false promises. While it is much cheaper and easier than a traditional lawsuit, because neither side is allowed to bring lawyers and the court filing system is streamlined in comparison, it’s still a roadblock and still requires fees.
It also requires knowledge of the system, which is why Tesla wanted to add a “non-advice” clause to Butler’s settlement. By tamping down on public knowledge of how to file these claims, Tesla can hopefully settle them one by one and not have to pay restitute across its entire customer base, at least 285,000 of which have paid for FSD.
This is why class actions are good at holding companies accountable, because they can combine several claims together. Otherwise, a company isn’t going to care about losing a few thousand dollars here and there – they’ll offer quick settlements and get on with their day.
It’s also why companies prefer binding arbitration clauses, which deprive workers and consumers of their legal right to seek remedy through the legal system or through class action lawsuits. But forced arbitration has been upheld repeatedly by the consumer-hostile “supreme” court of the US, more than half of whom were appointed or confirmed undemocratically, so it stands to reason that they wouldn’t care about what would benefit the public most.
This is relevant because Tesla recently weaseled out of one of these class action lawsuits by claiming successfully in court that all owners must go through arbitration if they want to receive remedy. The court even boneheadedly ruled that one owner who did not accept the arbitration clause was not allowed to sue because they waited too long to do so, even though Tesla’s violation is happening on a continuing basis.
And none of this is great for customer or public perception of Tesla. While they may be profiting off of sales of future software, they could do a lot better for goodwill by offering customers who feel jilted to refund a system which they’ve never been able to use – and may never be able to use over the course of the entire lifetime of the vehicle, given that some have now had FSD functionality for 6 years without it actually being usable yet.
For now, the steps above may not apply to the US the same as they apply to the UK. But if you’re in the UK and want your money back for a non-working Full Self-Driving system, it sounds like the process is relatively simple. Head on over to the Tesla Motors Club forum thread to learn more and see a selection of documents that Butler filed. And if anyone tries the same in the US (or if you have tried it and succeeded in the past), we’d love to hear about it.
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![Is this the Hyundai Santa Fe EV? Well, sort of [Video]](https://i0.wp.com/electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2025/10/Hyundai-Santa-Fe-EV.jpeg?resize=1200,628&quality=82&strip=all&ssl=1)
Hyundai’s midsize SUV is already due for a facelift, including a new design and electrified powertrain. It’s not a pure EV, but the new Hyundai Santa Fe will offer electric-only driving.
Is Hyundai launching the Santa Fe EV?
The Santa Fe is slightly bigger than the Tesla Model Y and one of Hyundai’s most popular vehicles, so an EV version would make sense, right?
Hyundai introduced hybrid and plug-in hybrid powertrains for the 2021 model year. The fifth-generation, launched last year, brought a bold new look, added power, and a new hybrid option.
Now, it’s official, the next Santa Fe will be radically different from the current model. A camouflaged prototype was spotted in South Korea with a few design updates, but that’s not all.
Although it’s still under wraps, a sticker on the side of the vehicle confirms that this Santa Fe is actually an extended-range electric vehicle (EREV). Hyundai announced plans to launch its first EREV in 2027 during last month’s CEO Investor Day.
According to Hyundai, the new electrified vehicle will offer an “EV-like” driving experience, delivering over 600 miles (960 km) of combined range.
The vehicle is still equipped with a battery for pure EV driving, but it also has a gas engine that acts as a generator to extend the driving range when the battery gets low. Hyundai will use in-house batteries, which it claims will offer “full EV power performance with less than half the battery capacity.”
The video from HealerTV takes a closer look at the vehicle to show where the battery and high-voltage lines are located.
Although it’s covered, you can see a few design updates, including new head and rear lights that appear closer to the Palisade.
While Hyundai is preparing to launch the Santa Fe EREV, Genesis is also planning to introduce its first extended-range EV. We caught a sneak peek of the Genesis GV70 EREV earlier this month, which is also expected to arrive in 2027. It will follow the luxury brands’ first hybrid, the GV80, due out next year.
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In the last week, two former Tesla self-driving/Autopilot program leaders have commented on the state of autonomous driving, telling a very different story than their former boss, Elon Musk.
Elon Musk has been notoriously wrong about predicting when Tesla would solve self-driving.
The CEO first announced that “all Tesla vehicles produced since 2016 have all the hardware necessary to achieve full self-driving,” and then claimed, every year from 2019 to 2025, that Tesla would deliver the capability through software updates by the end of each year.
He reiterated the prediction recently, saying Tesla would remove the safety monitor from its robotaxi service in Austin and enable “unsupervised self-driving” in consumer vehicles by the end of 2025.
There’s been a running gag at Tesla about engineers finding out that the company is supposed to deliver something as Musk announces it publicly – leading to a large discrepancy between what Tesla is working on and what Musk claims it will deliver.
Self-driving has been a good example.
While Musk has repeatedly claimed for the last 6 years that Tesla is on the verge of solving autonomy, the people actually working on the technology are not really in agreement. Some of them who left are starting to speak out.
Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s former head of artificial intelligence, who led the Autopilot and self-driving programs at Tesla from 2017 to 2022, recently warned that autonomous driving is far from a solved problem.
In a new podcast this week, the AI expect again warned that autonomy is not solved:
He said that he would “push pack” on the idea that what we are seeing in the world of autonomy today, with Tesla and Waymo, means it is a solved problem.
Karpathy said:
“[…] I think basically what takes the long amount of time and the way to think about it is that it’s a march of nines and every single nine is a constant amount of work, so every single nine is the same amount of work, so when you get a demo and something works 90% of the time, that’s just the first nine, and then you need the second nine, and third nine, fourth nine, fifth nine, and while I was at Tesla for five years or so, i think we went through maybe three nines or two nines. I don’t know, but like multiple nines of iteration, there’s still more nines to go, and so that’s why these things take so long […]”
Some data support what the engineer is claiming, as the latest FSD Beta software updates that the Tesla team delivered under his leadership did result in a significant reduction in driver intervention, but the progress has been much less evident since:
The first few ‘9s’ deliver a much greater impact, statistically, than the next ones, even though, as Karpathy pointed out, the next ones are just as important and they are just as tricky as the previous 9s.
While he highlights that there’s still a lot of work to be done, Karpathy did say that he belives Tesla’s approach to be more scalable.
He is not the only former Tesla Autopilot program leader to speak out recently.
Sterling Anderson is recognized as the first Autopilot program leader at Tesla in 2015-2016. He now leads global products at GM, which announced this week that it plans to launch level 3 autonomous driving in 2028.
During the event announcing the new autonomous driving timeline at GM, Anderson took a jab at his former employer:
Our customers have driven over 700 million hands-free miles with Super Cruise without a single accident attributed to the technology. I led Autopilot, and you can’t say that for Autopilot. I think this is the long-term play: we build trust with customers by delivering safe products.
He has a point considering Tesla is currently flooded with lawsuits related to accident that involved its Autopilot or ‘Full Self-Driving’ features.
The GM executive favor the more careful approach to autnomous driving.
Electrek’s Take
As I often point out, there’s what Elon says, and there’s what Tesla’s lawyers say.
Elon’s own lawyers say Tesla shareholders shouldn’t listen to him, calling his statements “mere corporate puffery.” That’s an actual quote.
I do believe that Tesla will achieve unsupervised self-driving in consumer vehicles at someone point, but I don’t have any evidence that it is close to happen.
As Karpathy said, there are still several 9s to go through before it can be at 99.9999999%, which is needed for level4-5 autonomy, and each of those 9s represent years of work.
I think there’s a clear discrepenacy between how Elon talks about self-driving at Tesla and what people who are actually building those systems, like Anderson and Karpathy from 2015 to 2022, are experiencing.
Elon has been lucky to find Ashok, Tesla’s current self-driving leader, who seems to be perfectly willing to endorse his consistently wrong FSD predictions.
It’s not really surprising when you know that Ashok is the one who produce the infamous FSD demo of 2016. As Karpathy pointed out, we should be doubtful of AI demos.
Looking the prediction markets, people don’t really believe in what Elon is claiming. On Polymarket, people who have been betting on Tesla’s not delivering unsupervised self-driving this year have made a lot of money:
Elon reitereted the goal this week and the “no” answer still gained ground after his claim that Tesla was on track.
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This week on Electrek’s Wheel-E podcast, we discuss the most popular news stories from the world of electric bikes and other nontraditional electric vehicles. This time, that includes Rivian’s new ALSO e-bike, FLIT sells a pound of caviar with its new lightweight folding e-bike, Florida wants e-bike riders to get a license, and more.
The Wheel-E podcast returns every two weeks on Electrek’s YouTube channel, Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter.
As a reminder, we’ll have an accompanying post, like this one, on the site with an embedded link to the live stream. Head to the YouTube channel to get your questions and comments in.
After the show ends, the video will be archived on YouTube and the audio on all your favorite podcast apps:
We also have a Patreon if you want to help us to avoid more ads and invest more in our content. We have some awesome gifts for our Patreons and more coming.
Here are a few of the articles that we will discuss during the Wheel-E podcast today:
Here’s the live stream for today’s episode starting at 11:00 a.m. ET (or the video after 12:00 p.m. ET):
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