Tesla, Inc.

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Tesla, Inc.

Basic information
Founded	2003
Type	Public
Industry	Automotive
Official website	https://tesla.com/

Tesla, Inc. (formerly Tesla Motors) is a company founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003. In 2008, it was funded and taken over by Elon Musk, when both original founders left their positions.

Controversies

After the company was bought by Elon Musk it has been involved in a number of controversies such as requiring subscriptions or requiring a Tesla technician to fix 2012's Model S, With cases such as the continued denial of adding Apple Carplay or Android Auto to their vehicles, putting an expiry date on their cars, and making a $100,000 utility vehicle whose warranty is void by a car wash.

This is a list of all consumer protection incidents this company is involved in. Any incidents not mentioned here can be found in the Tesla category.

Artificially disabling functionality

Tesla was early in holding functionality hostage that the car owner had already bought and paid for, when Tesla decided to "offer an acceleration boost" that made the car accelerate faster once the "acceleration boost" software change was bought.

Tesla advertised how good and useful it was that their Tesla Model 3 cars had a hardware radar installed. A few years later Tesla would no longer include the radar hardware in their Tesla Model 3 cars they build from then on. However Tesla kept including the radar hardware in their more expensive Model S (and maybe also Model X?) cars. Shortly thereafter Tesla released a forced Over The Air (OTA) software update that disabled the radar hardware in all older Tesla Model 3 cars as well. One consequence of disabling the already bought radar was that the older cars now also had a forced Traffic-Aware Cruise Control (TACC) following distance interval reduced from 1-7 to 2-7. Another consequence was that those cars now also had a lot worse ability to be aware of traffic around them which made their autopilot decisions much worse, such as panic braking for no apparent reason.

Tesla regularly removes car features that everyone takes for granted nowadays eg. their Ultrasonic Sensors (parking sensors) presumably to save Tesla money, most of these changes are done silently with no public or media announcements.Tesla also has removed their hardware rain sensors for similar reasons and similar consequences.

Wrongful legal threats

Tesla once sent a legal threat to a Swedish car repair company called "Grufman Bil AB" to take down a YouTube video that they had posted that showed them smashing a car component that was supposed to hold up a wheel with a big hammer, showing how that component was made of metal that was a lot weaker than one could reasonably expect. Grufman Bil decided to quickly take down that video and when someone asked them why, Grufman Bil said "because it's not worth getting sued over," which indicates that Tesla was possibly threatening to sue people who show important car defects.

Resale restrictions

Tesla has recently started prohibiting the resale of its vehicles within one year of purchase, imposing fines of up to $50,000 on owners who violate the policy. This is done without regard for situations that may necessitate a resale, and appears to align with practices adopted by other companies.