— Tesla argues an odometer lawsuit is full of inaccurate claims and allegations that require dismissal of the entire class action.
The original class action was filed by 2020 Tesla Model Y owner Nyree Hinton to cover "all citizens residing in California who purchased a new or used Tesla Vehicle for personal, family, or household purposes."
Plaintiff Hinton was later joined by Tesla owner Anthony Leon, with both complaining Tesla's odometers are inaccurate and the automaker knows it.
The class action alleges Tesla uses an odometer system with "predictive algorithms, energy consumption metrics, and driver behavior multipliers that manipulate and misrepresent the actual mileage." This supposedly overstates the distance traveled.
Tesla purportedly denies warranty repairs by "tying warranty limits and lease mileage caps to inflated 'odometer' readings, Tesla increases repair revenue, reduces warranty obligations, and compels consumers to purchase extended warranties prematurely."
According to the Tesla odometer lawsuit, mileage is inflated by 15% to 117% higher than other vehicles and above the four percent industry standard. And the Tesla odometer "scheme" purportedly avoids the expense of installing odometers that are accurate.
Motion to Dismiss the Tesla Odometer Lawsuit
Tesla notes how the plaintiffs claim the odometers “do not function like commonly accepted odometers, but instead rely on a variety of factors, predictive algorithms, and metrics that result in routine overestimation of the mileage traveled by the vehicle.”
According to the Tesla odometer lawsuit:
“Tesla’s Odometer System integrates data from GPS sensors, energy consumption readings, and historical driving patterns to display distance traveled," and “[u]pon information and belief Tesla’s reliance on predictive algorithms, energy consumption metrics, and software recalibrations contributes to these discrepancies and undermines the accuracy of the odometer readings in Tesla Vehicles.”
However, Tesla told the judge all those allegations are lies.
Tesla argues the so-called theory of how the odometers work contains no facts. The automaker also points out how Tesla supposedly conceals this information, yet somehow the plaintiffs claim to have figured it out?
According to Tesla's motion to dismiss, the odometers indeed do “function like commonly accepted odometers” using third-party components from common automotive suppliers and are "virtually indistinguishable" from odometers used by other automakers.
Tesla says its odometers do not use “GPS sensors,” “predictive algorithms," "energy consumption metrics” or the other things referenced in the lawsuit.
The automaker then references the original odometer class action lawsuit which is based on a Tesla patent that did concern "energy consumption metrics and predictive algorithms." But Tesla says the patent has nothing to do with odometer calculations and the plaintiffs were provided that evidence.
"When Tesla provided a copy of that patent during informal discovery and pointed out that it was for trip planning software to optimize recharging stops, and that the patent said nothing about being used for odometer calculations, Plaintiffs deleted references to the patent from their Amended Complaint, but left in all of the inferences they used it to draw, without providing any new supporting facts." — Tesla
According to Tesla, this fact alone should convince the judge to throw out the entire class action. However, the odometer lawsuit allegedly fails for additional reasons.
Tesla told the judge the vehicles owned by the two plaintiffs each have two backup odometers, one inside each drive unit (the front and rear electric motors) which record the number of times each motor has completed a revolution. Each drive unit relies on its own internal sensors, but Tesla says the odometer uses a separate set of sensors and does not use the drive unit data.
Tesla goes on to explain there was a joint inspection of Hinton's car at the plaintiff's expert facility where the drive unit data was read out.
Tesla's motion to dismiss argues basic arithmetic showed on the day of the inspection, the front drive unit showed 68,490.65 miles, the odometer showed 68,574 miles, and the rear drive unit showed 68,695.92 miles.
"Thus, all mileage calculations were within 0.2% of each other, as measured by three completely independent sets of sensors. This fraction of a percent variance is well within the 4% odometer tolerance industry standard identified by Plaintiffs." — Tesla
Tesla's engineers drafted a report on the odometer data which was given to the plaintiffs within hours of the inspection. But the automaker complains the plaintiffs did not respond to the report and instead modified their class action and refiled it. The new lawsuit does not reference the proof provided in the inspection of Hinton's vehicle.
Tesla says it then offered to perform a joint inspection of plaintiff Leon's drive units but the plaintiffs said no. In addition, Tesla told the plaintiffs they could learn how the odometers function by offering the plaintiffs a brand new Tesla to take it for joint testing at a test track to test mileage accumulation under controlled conditions.
However, Tesla says the plaintiffs declined the offer.
The Tesla odometer lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California: Nyree Hinton v. Tesla, Inc., et al.
The plaintiffs are represented by Singleton Schreiber, LLP.