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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

[Playing devil's advocate]

So Tesla did not accept the payment, and tried to contact the customer to sort it out. Customer did not reply to emails, or respond to phone calls.

After some time, Tesla needs to get car back, so they do.

Once payment has been made in full, car is returned.

Obviously inconvenient and not ideal, but what should Tesla have done differently? They tried and could not contact the customer, for all they knew the person was deliberately trying to avoid them and keep the car without paying.

Would you expect any company to behave differently if acceptable payment has not been made, and the customer does not respond to contact attempts?

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This isn’t how it works. If you hand someone a check and they don’t cash it then that’s not your problem full stop. If an employee deposits the check into their personal account and disappears with the money, the customer isn’t liable they already paid by handing over a valid check.

These people didn’t send them new money, they got people working at Tesla to properly deal with money they had been given months ago.

Legally Tesla committed grand theft.

PS: It’s an important distinction as people often want to get out of contracts, saying we didn’t deposit the check therefore the contract isn’t valid isn’t allowed.

For what it's worth, Tesla accepted the payment when they accepted the banker's draft and handed the car over.

A payment by cheque is legally made when the cheque changes hands (like when notes/bills change hands). This is only reversed if the cheque bounces (and banker's drafts don't bounce anyway, that's the point of them).

> So Tesla did not accept the payment

No, they accepted payment at the point of sale, lost the payment instrument after accepting it (and apparently without recording the fact of acceptance), and then took property that had legally been transferred to the customer with the intent to permanently deprive the rightful owner of the posession of the property.

> Obviously inconvenient and not ideal, but what should Tesla have done differently?

Administratively, they should record the acceptance of payment at the point of sale. To avoid inconvenience to themselves, they should probably better keep track of payment instruments. In any case, they should not commit what certainly seems like grand theft auto, barring a rather extremely broad view of what constitutes a reasonable mistake of fact.

> what should Tesla have done differently?

They shouldn't go after people based on bad information. A poor internal process is not a license to do whatever you want. They made up a lie, believed it, and used it as justification to hurt someone.

Dude. Just no.

When you buy a car and put any amount of money down, including full, the amount and method is documented.

It’s patently clear that some Tesla agent saw that a car was not paid for for some reason and didn’t bother to spend more than a second of time investigating before blaming the customer and repoing their car.

> but what should Tesla have done differently?

They could start by not losing their customer's check, and then blaming the customer for it?

> So Tesla did not accept the payment, and tried to contact the customer to sort it out.

Incorrect. Vehicles are never handed over to customers until they're paid for. (A vehicle that is financed is paid for upfront by the bank, and the customer pays back the bank over the loan term.) The price of vehicles (especially Teslas) is such that it would be negligence, malpractice, insanity for the manufacturer or dealership to hand a vehicle over without full payment. It's always sorted out beforehand.

There shouldn’t have been a lien on the title in the first place… IMO this probably a fake story but if it’s not then whoever filed the paperwork to put a lien on the title of a car without there being any documentation of a loan totally screwed up.

> what should Tesla have done differently?

The remote control an tracking features should be in the hands of the owner, not Tesla. Tesla should be forced to contact the owner and get a secret password before they can even track the vehicle, let alone bricking it.

Tesla or their representative did accept payment. They then lost it.

[Let's go on with the devil]

[quote] He looked through his emails and noticed that he did in fact receive only two emails on July 27 and July 28, stating that we had not yet paid for the car and that the full cost of the vehicle is still at large. These emails went ignored as he believed them to be a phishing attempt because we had already PAID IN FULL at the dealership. He also believed that Tesla could not have made such a huge mistake like this. [/quote]

Customer ignored Tesla communications attempts. Perhaps because he read on sites like HN that the entire internet is out to get you. Maybe we should share part of the guilt.

Or maybe giant corporations failing to perform due diligence internally ought not be a cost that they get to impose on their customers without legal consequence.

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