Tesla FSD refund lawsuit: Car owners lose at first instance… Court rules "not a contract guaranteeing full self-driving"

*This content was translated by AI.View Original

A first-instance court ruled against car owners who sued Tesla for the return of purchase payments, claiming they had not received the promised features of the company's Full Self-Driving (FSD) option. According to legal sources on the 29th, Civil Division 30 (Presiding Judge Kim Seok-beom) of the Seoul Central District Court dismissed all claims filed by 89 Tesla owners, including Mr. Kang, against Tesla Korea for the return of purchase payments.

The car owners who filed the lawsuit purchased the FSD option for approximately 9 million won between 2019 and 2022. They argued that Tesla had failed to implement full self-driving nine years after launching sales, and that the performance of the existing hardware (HW 3.0) installed in their vehicles was insufficient to provide the promised features. Furthermore, they claimed that Tesla's change of the FSD name to "Supervised" and its shift to a subscription model signified an abandonment of full self-driving, demanding contract termination and a refund of the payments.

However, the court determined that the FSD option purchase agreement was not a contract guaranteeing "Level 5" full automation requiring no driver intervention whatsoever. The subject of the contract is partial automation features, such as traffic light recognition and urban automatic steering, which presuppose driver intervention, and it is an indefinite-term contract stipulating that future additional features would be provided contingent upon regulatory approval and technological development. Accordingly, the court held that the inability to provide the features immediately or their incomplete implementation on the existing HW 3.0 did not constitute contractual impossibility of performance or delay in performance.

The court also stated that delays in feature provision due to regulatory compliance could not be attributed to Tesla's fault, and that since the car owners had already received some features such as Autopilot (AP) and had acquired the status to receive future additional features under development, liability for defects did not apply. With this ruling, Tesla Korea secured a first-instance victory in the legal dispute surrounding the Tesla FSD option, which is expected to serve as a key precedent for similar lawsuits overall.

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*This content was translated by AI.View Original