Tesla and Elon Musk won a big Autopilot lawsuit
Tesla and CEO Elon Musk got a big win in court when the automaker won the dismissal of a shareholder lawsuit that alleged misleading statements about the capabilities of self-driving were said to prop up its stock price. While this is certainly a win, Tesla and Musk can’t breathe too big of a sign of relief yet. The company still faces a number of other complaints and regulatory investigations into its marketing.
Back in April of this year. Musk said that Tesla was going “ball to the wall for autonomy” while saying the robotaxi would be revealed later this year (nine days from now, in fact.) Musk has been a huge cheerleader for autonomy for over a decade now, and he’s even persuaded customers to pay thousands of dollars for Full Self-Driving. From Bloomberg:
The name is a misnomer — FSD requires constant supervision and doesn’t render vehicles autonomous — but Musk has repeatedly predicted Tesla is on the verge of measuring up to the branding. The company is embroiled in numerous lawsuits over the features, including from Tesla investors who claim they were misled.
In her ruling Monday, US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín rejected shareholders’ allegations that Musk overstated Tesla’s technology with assurances that drivers could “go to sleep” in their car by 2020, among other promises. She found that some of the alleged overstatements concerned future plans, while others weren’t necessarily false.
“Plaintiffs fail to connect Musk’s hands-on management with any information that he allegedly learned rendering his statements false or misleading,” the judge wrote. However, she gave the investors until Oct. 30 to file an updated version of their complaint.
Investors claimed they were harmed when the truth about Tesla’s shortcomings came to light and its stock price fell, according to the complaint, which alleged that Musk sold $39 billion in stock before then.
Tesla consumers are moving ahead with a separate proposed class action over the company’s marketing of its driving systems, while Tesla earlier this year settled a high-profile lawsuit involving a fatal crash while its Autopilot feature was engaged.
Still, Tesla faces numerous federal probes into whether or not Autopilot defects have caused fatal crashes. It’s also facing investigations by federal prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission into whether Tesla made misleading claims about the feature to the public, Bloomberg reports. Similar claims that have been brought by the California Department of Motor Vehicles were allowed to move forward earlier in 2024.
A version of this article originally appeared on Jalopnik’s The Morning Shift.
