The world's first penalty against Tesla's autonomous driving: Germany ruled that Autopilot ads misled buyers, Tesla's Berlin factory may be hindered

Jia Haonan from Aofei Temple
Quantum Bit Report | Public Account QbitAI

"Fully automatic? Don't lie."

On July 14, the Munich Court in Germany officially ruled that Tesla had exaggerated its Autopilot advertisements and misled car owners, and officially banned Tesla from using such advertising.

This means that Tesla will no longer be able to claim or imply that its vehicles have fully autonomous driving capabilities in its advertising throughout Germany.

This is also the first case in the world against Tesla's self-driving promotion.

Tesla reserves the right to appeal, but still changes its promotion

In this case, the final ruling was made by the Munich Court, but the plaintiff was not the German government regulatory agency, but the German Center for Unfair Competition and Protection (Wettbewerbszentrale), an independent private institution against unfair competition.

The agency's allegations suggest that Tesla's related publicity in Germany - regarding autonomous driving - was suspected of misleading consumers.

They believe that Tesla's promotional language for autonomous driving is misleading.

On the one hand, the capabilities are exaggerated, and the assistance system is promoted as " the full potential of autonomous driving " or " the vehicle includes autonomous driving (Autopilot inclusive)", which is misleading to car owners and buyers.

On the other hand, this may lead to more serious consequences, because Tesla's propaganda will cause buyers to have a cognitive bias and believe that the vehicle can move forward without driver intervention.

In addition, Tesla's publicity also implies that the relevant autonomous driving system has been permitted by laws and regulations in Germany.

But it doesn’t.

Foreign media Reuters also commented that Tesla's publicity will bring further social problems.

Because some car owners believe that the assistance system can complete the driving task for a long time with little or no human intervention - this tempts the driver to slack off and ignore his obligation to always control the vehicle.

The plaintiff's lawyer Andreas Ottofuelling also emphasized in the statement that the fully autonomous driving function implied in Tesla's advertisements has not been realized in reality. In addition, Germany has no legal framework related to autonomous driving in cities.

So based on the above arguments, on July 14, the Munich Court ruled on the case, supporting the claims of German civil organizations and prohibiting Tesla Germany from using misleading slogans such as " the full potential of autonomous driving " and " includes autonomous driving " in its advertising materials.

The German court said Tesla has the right to appeal, but neither Tesla Germany nor Tesla officials have indicated whether they will appeal.

But Tesla Germany has changed the "Autopilot" in its advertisements to "Autodrive".

What does Musk think?

Musk has long been optimistic about Tesla's self-driving capabilities, and even began charging customers thousands of dollars for "full self-driving" as early as 2016.

Musk has always been blunt in his response to those who belittle and question Tesla's autonomous driving technology.

The attitude is the same this time.

Although Musk did not respond to the incident publicly, some netizens defended Tesla on Twitter, and Musk replied to express his support.

Netizens believe that there is no "misleading" in Autopilot. The term Autopilot comes from the aerospace field and itself refers to an assisted driving system that cannot replace humans.

Musk responded in agreement, saying that the term "Autopilot" was completely inherited from aerospace.

At the same time, Musk did not forget to diss Germany. The name of Germany's highway is Autobahn . Why is there no suspicion of misleading when you use "Auto" for German highways?

In fact, after several autonomous driving accidents, Tesla has made it clear in its policies that Autopilot cannot completely replace humans, and drivers need to keep their hands on the steering wheel and be ready to take over the vehicle at any time.

But in its car advertising, Tesla still uses "full potential for autonomous driving" as a selling point, although it does not directly say it will replace humans.

Musk himself is very confident in Tesla's autonomous driving technology, which does not use lidar but relies only on visual solutions.

At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference that just concluded in Shanghai two days ago, Musk also stated that he is establishing an autonomous driving engineer team in Tesla China and expects to complete the basic functions of the L5 autonomous driving system within this year.

Tesla's Ice and Fire

Despite occasional accidents, Tesla's sales have still soared this year.

Tesla said it delivered 90,650 vehicles in the second quarter, compared with 95,365 in the same period last year.

Despite the impact of the epidemic, Tesla's performance in the second quarter was still the same as the same period last year, and it was ahead of other automakers all the way.

In the first quarter of this year, Tesla produced 102,672 electric vehicles and delivered 88,400, with delivery volumes higher than the average expectations of Wall Street analysts.

This is also Tesla's best half-year performance ever.

The German court's ruling itself did not have much impact on Tesla's stock price.

The market's short-term focus remains on Tesla's financial report to be released on July 22.

After experiencing fluctuations from a 6% increase to a 3% decrease at the opening on Tuesday, Tesla's stock price has rebounded with the market and is currently up 1.32% as of press time.

Now, Tesla's market value has exceeded 280 billion US dollars, and it has increased by more than 100 billion in the past ten days. It ranks first in the world's auto market value.

But the German court's ruling is not completely without impact. Foreign media analysis shows that at least Tesla's Berlin factory may be hindered.

Reuters revealed that the construction of Tesla's Berlin factory was not smooth sailing from the beginning. First, the German local government gave Tesla some support policies for building the factory, but it did not support Tesla as strongly as Shanghai, China.

At the central government level, the German federal government's incentives for purchasing electric vehicles are not as strong as those offered by the Chinese government.

What is most troubling for Tesla is the protests and marches by local environmental groups and the general public where the factory is built. These voices will directly affect the policies of local governments.

In addition, Tesla is also troubled by car owners who seek redress after experiencing AutoPilot accidents.

For example, in China, a Tesla owner in Shenzhen encountered an accident in which his car accelerated towards a dump truck that was changing lanes while using AutoPilot.

Event Portal

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/O_eoioeOCBlJljsOv8Uy3g

However, when contacting Tesla to protect their rights, Tesla officials insisted that it was the car owner who did not use AutoPilot properly and failed to take over his Tesla in an emergency, so Tesla believed that the responsibility for the accident lay with the car owner.

This is also the core reason why Tesla has never been held legally responsible in AutoPilot accidents.

Because in Tesla's system, although the "autonomous driving service" AutoPilot is provided, the ultimate control of the vehicle still lies with the owner, and the owner can take over the car in an emergency.

However, there is always a paradox in the classification of autonomous driving levels, which is the classification centered on whether there is "human takeover" or not.

As we all know, Google, which was the first to start the commercialization of autonomous driving, initially focused on L3 autonomous driving, which means that humans and machines drive together, and machine driving is only auxiliary. Humans need to stay focused at all times and take over in emergencies.

But later in the process of advancement, it was discovered that "it is normal for human drivers to be unreliable." Once the machine drives well, they will relax their vigilance or even fall asleep, completely handing over the driving rights to the machine, not to mention taking over in an emergency.

Later, Google completely abandoned the L3 route and focused on promoting autonomous driving above L4, with autonomous driving completely achieved by machines, and the safety responsibility that should be borne by the driver fell on the autonomous driving system.

△ Google released the 2013 self-driving test, and the engineers put on makeup in the car

However, Musk and Tesla do not think so.

Tesla firmly believes that autonomous driving can be continuously iterated from L2 and L3 to L4 and L5, from human-machine co-driving to fully unmanned driving. The actual road test scenarios and data accumulated in the human-machine co-driving stage can also help realize AI model iteration.

What is even more widely criticized is that, due to its ambitions, Tesla has always relied on camera-based visual solutions rather than more expensive lidar redundancy for the perception redundancy required for its autonomous driving system.

However, Tesla's vision-based solution has been proven after accident after accident to be not as safe and reliable as officially advertised.

So the current German case for Tesla’s autonomous driving may just be the beginning.

Traffic safety departments and car owner survivors in more countries may take this opportunity to demand explanations from Tesla in more countries and regions.

Reference Links

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-autopilot-germany/german-court-bans-tesla-ad-statements-related-to-autonomous-driving-idUSKCN24F1T5