I will admit that this is a relatively benign fraud for Tesla. There's no obvious victim, unlike when Tesla simply pocketed $250,000,000 of deposits for the Roadster or conned people into buying "robotaxis" which fully self drove themselves into oncoming traffic.
A 3d printing YouTuber I used to follow did just that. Justified the high cost of getting a model 3 that it will pay for itself in a year when the robotaxies feature is available.
I stop following him after that. I can't take his reviews seriously if he falls for that crap.
They are likely referring to Elon’s 2018 promise that people that bought Teslas could make money while they slept because people could rent their Tesla from an app and the car would return to the users driveway by the morning.
Hire cars (backed by credit card) don't seem to fare sooo bad.
Although I'd hate to argue the toss over any scratches i certainly didn't make, it must have been the last renter.
Legal minefield?
Sure but he didn't say it would happen for certain by a certain day. If he did, even then, it wouldn't be fraud, it would just be a company not living up to what they promised. Which is nothing new, nor is it fraud.
Fraud would be someone intentionally deceiving you, which in this case would be nearly impossible to prove, hence not fraud.
But he did say that [0] and he does intentionally deceive customes.
One of the key reasons why it doesn't constitute as fraud is his abundant use of "I'm confident that ____" (and similar) he uses when stating these ludicrous things. It is deceptive and it is amoral but legally it is not fraud since those are opinions and not stated as facts.
I think Elon says things fully expecting them to become true.
Whenever I hear him say "I'm confident that X will happen by Y", I mentally add "provided that every single engineer at [one of his companies] puts in 20 hour days for 2 years and manages to solve a mountain of problems that have never been solved before."
Sometimes it works, which unfortunately encourages the behavior.
A company not living up to what it promised when it is telling you to buy the product on the basis of that promise meets the first condition of fraud. It absolutely can be fraud.
The only question is whether the company or company representative making the claim knew what they were saying was untrue.
Based on stuff Elon said in the same presentation as being true as of the day he made the presentation actually being false, I suspect he was indeed aware that he was just lying, but it’s hard to prove in a court of law, and Tesla is a huge company with an extraordinarily active legal department, so it’s unlikely a customer would take him to court.
Oh great, so they were advertised a product description and the fine print waived the entire product description and tossed out every verbal promise. In what universe is that anything other than intentional, bad faith deception? If somebody sold you a cereal box and then only gave you a empty box, would you also go: "Aw shucks, I guess the seller did not intend to deceive me, it was my fault for not reading the fine print."
It is absurd to protect statements that are "technically true, but substantially false" that have been carefully crafted and focus grouped to intentionally imply something other than what they know to be the truth. Anything less than statements which are "substantially true" that have been intentionally crafted to avoid incorrect interpretations should be, and colloquially is, viewed as fraud.
It is utterly ridiculous that the richest person in the world and the largest car company in the world are held to the moral standards of a monkey's paw.
The money is fully refundable, and the people who signed up agreed to the terms. There is no fraud there. They can still get their money back if they are tired of waiting.
If you make someone sign a contract promising a product and you strongly indicate it will be delivered by a certain date, it’s still fraud if you know it won’t be delivered by that date even if the contract says that the date is just a suggestion.
I mean, that’s actually the very definition of fraud. Getting someone to sign a contract by deceiving them.
Of course, it’s hard to prove that someone knew that they were lying, which is why fraud is hard to prosecute. But it’s amazing seeing Tesla fans go out of their way to take bullets so Tesla doesn’t even suffer the social consequences their fraud should cause them for absolutely nothing.
So you've proven is not fraud. You would have to prove that they knew they couldn't deliver it by that date. And you can't do that with any available information.
It was a Yamaha raptor kit banged with zero motorcycle. Which is one step closer to production than a dancer off craigslist dressed in a white full body leotard.
There are some actual electric ATVs available (in fact polaris/zero have partnered up to make some) but mostly they're ugly utv side-by-side beefed up golf carts.
The advertised range of the announced vehicles are in the 250 to 340 mile range. When I read "promised range", those are the numbers I'm thinking of.
The battery pack referred to in the article title adds to that promised range. Instead of the "promised range" of 250 to 340, it increases range to 440 to 470.
