Last year, a whistleblower leaked a trove of Tesla documents to the German publication Handlesblatt, which revealed, among other things, that Tesla maintained a team to divert customer complaints, particularly about its driver assists. The team had instructions to only communicate with customers about problems verbally instead of leaving a paper trail. The whistleblower has since said he leaked the documents because he saw “serious lapses” in Autopilot safety.
Both Autopilot and FSD have been subject to massive recalls, most recently in December 2023, when Tesla had to recall more than 2 million cars to fix a number of flaws highlighted by NHTSA. But the regulator is not satisfied with that most recent recall and has demanded answers from Tesla about the cars it was applied to and the decision-making that occurred leading up to the recall.
“Balls to the wall”
However, the partially automated driving systems remain critically important to Tesla, particularly FSD. In April, the company dropped the price of this controversial option by $4,000, and Musk recently told his followers that “[g]oing balls to the wall for autonomy is a blindingly obvious move.” As Tesla’s profit margins and sales shrink, the revenue brought in by FSD is becoming increasingly important to the company’s bottom line, even though not all of it can be recognized currently.
There is no guarantee that prosecutors will charge Tesla with fraud. Neither “puffery” nor “corporate optimism” counts as fraud, according to US courts, and the DOJ would need to prove that Tesla knew its claims were untrue. As we saw last year, relying on Musk’s social media posts probably won’t work, but the prosecutors have subpoenaed what Reuters described as “voluminous documents” from the automaker.
Although Tesla has no press office to call for comment, in its recently released 10-Q, it stated that “[t]o our knowledge, no government agency in any ongoing investigation has concluded that any wrongdoing occurred.”
