Musk ripping off customers again. Tesla odometers are rigged to speed up their mileage to make warranties expire sooner

A class action lawsuit recently filed in California alleges that the odometers in Tesla vehicles are inaccurate. Since the brand uses warranties tied to mileage, these inaccuracies could lead cars to fall out of warranty sooner than they would with a typical odometer reading that would fall within an expected range of accuracy.

A complaint filed by law firm Singleton Schreiber on April 4th and received by Road & Track alleges that "Tesla Inc. knowingly overstates the distances traveled in Tesla Vehicles, or at minimum tolerates substantial inaccuracy in distances traveled in Tesla Inc.'s favor."

The suit says that this occurs because the brand "employs an odometer system that utilizes predictive algorithms, energy consumption metrics, and driver behavior multipliers that manipulate and misrepresent the actual mileage traveled by Tesla Vehicles."

The primary plaintiff in the suit, Nyree Hinton, states that he bought a pre-owned Tesla Model Y with approximately 36,772 miles on it. The suit claims that his car recorded an average of 2217 miles per month during his first six months of ownership, which pushed the car over the 50,000-mile mark — the point at which the car's bumper-to-bumper "Basic Warranty" expired.

Over the next year of ownership, however, the suit states that the plaintiff reported that his Model Y's odometer recorded an average mileage of just 1415 miles per month. The plaintiff says that his commute actually increased during that time, yet the odometer recorded an average drop of approximately 800 miles per month.

The same plaintiff alleges that the car "consistently exhibited accelerated mileage accumulations of varying percentages ranging from 15% to 117% higher than plaintiff's other vehicles and his driving history."

The suit states that the plaintiff previously saw a six-month average of 6086 miles across three previous cars, two from Chevrolet and one from Mercedes, under comparable conditions. In a six-month window in his Tesla, however, the odometer allegedly stated that the driver accumulated 13,228 miles — 117% more than seen in the other vehicles.

The lawsuit also claims the plaintiff has found evidence on Reddit and other social media platforms of other Tesla owners "who have reported unexplained surges in odometer readings, particularly leading up to warranty expiration."

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