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.
I stop following him after that. I can't take his reviews seriously if he falls for that crap.
> buying "robotaxis" which fully self drove themselves into oncoming traffic.
This doesn't even make sense as they haven't released any sort of Robo Taxi yet.
Fraud would be someone intentionally deceiving you, which in this case would be nearly impossible to prove, hence not fraud.
[0] Article summarizing keynote (Apr. 2019) - https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-autonomous-driving-lev...
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.
I thought that of him years ago, but it's become really clear to me since then that he just lies.
But, practically speaking, that distinction doesn't matter much. Either way, it means you can't believe anything he says just because he says it.
I fully expect he does too. A bit like Steve Jobs' reality distortion field.
So not a fraudster, just a confidence man… a conman.
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.
This feels like when my kid tells me, "I did clean my room, see, I picked up two things. TECHNICALLY I CLEANED."
Adults that do this are called shysty assholes, and commonly, they sell cars. lol
This stuff just writes itself..
> Fraud would be someone intentionally deceiving you, which in this case would be nearly impossible to prove, hence not fraud.
Being difficult to prove the case in court doesn't mean an act isn't fraud. It just means the fraud is difficult to prove in court.
On paper, it sounds great, but it seems to miss the context of humans. Humans are a garbage species. Within a week, that Tesla would be trashed.
It's a neat idea, but the world isn't the pollyanna paradise required for this to work.
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.
Get a grip.
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 the Level 5 ‘robotaxis’ that were promised to be delivered in 2020 by Elon Musk are now delivered and are on the roads then?
I would also be annoyed if I was mislead into buying something that did not function or did not exist as advertised.
That is deceptive advertising, which is frequent with Tesla’s FSD scam.