New Tesla 'Full Self-Driving' Class Action Filed, Citing Electrek Reporting Twice

A proposed class action lawsuit filed against Tesla accuses the company of selling Full Self-Driving on millions of vehicles that are physically incapable of delivering fully autonomous driving—and the 51-page complaint goes out of its way to cite Electrek's own reporting twice.

What Happened

The suit, Waller v. Tesla (No. 4:26-cv-05350-KAW), filed June 4 in the Northern District of California, covers every Tesla sold with the FSD option from 2017 through early 2023—cars built with Hardware 1, 2, 2.5, and 3 computers. The named plaintiff is David Waller, a Frankfort, Kentucky resident who bought a 2020 Model S for $81,790 plus $7,000 for the FSD add-on. The complaint brings five counts including breach of express warranty, fraud by misrepresentation, and unjust enrichment, demanding a jury trial with damages, punitive damages, restitution, and disgorgement. What sets this filing apart is its foundation on Tesla's own admission during its Q1 2026 earnings call that HW3 vehicles 'simply do not have the capability to achieve unsupervised FSD,' citing CEO Elon Musk's April 22 statement as the moment Tesla 'finally admitted the truth.' The complaint also catalogs multiple fatal crashes tied to Autopilot, including the May 2016 death of Joshua Brown and the March 2019 death of Jeremy Banner—both involving Teslas driving under tractor-trailers at highway speeds.

Why It Matters

The lawsuit is carefully constructed to circumvent Tesla's arbitration agreement, anchoring itself in Kentucky law and defining a 'Nationwide Ex-California Arbitration Opt-Out Class' across 27 states—targeting owners who opted out like Waller. This represents a strategic end-run around the forced arbitration clause that has blocked most FSD disputes from open court. With Tesla now facing up to $14.5 billion in combined lawsuit exposure, and Musk having pushed unsupervised FSD timelines to Q4 2026 while planning physical retrofits on millions of cars, the company's defense that owners received 'evolving features' with proper hardware is significantly harder to maintain when they've publicly acknowledged HW3's limitations.

The Bottom Line

The complaint cites Electrek in two notable ways: quoting our 2022 review describing FSD Beta decision-making as resembling 'a 14-year-old who has been learning to drive for the last week,' and listing roughly a dozen of our articles from 2020—reporting on Tesla's promises—as part of the marketing record Waller relied upon. If this suit survives a motion to dismiss, it hands every other arbitration opt-out owner a template with Tesla's own earnings-call words as the centerpiece.