Tesla owners join class action lawsuit over FSD in Australia (electrek.co)

Thousands of Australian Tesla owners have joined a class action accusing the company of misleading claims about its “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) package and broader Autopilot/ADAS capabilities. The suit, brought after CEO Elon Musk conceded that Tesla’s Hardware 3 (HW3) computer “will not be capable of unsupervised self-driving,” argues that Tesla misrepresented vehicles as having “all the hardware for full self-driving” (previously described as Level 4–5 autonomy) and then failed to deliver promised retrofits or meaningful upgrades. The Australian case covers Model 3 and Model Y owners from May 2021 to Feb 2025 and seeks financial compensation; it follows similar class actions and regulatory probes in the U.S., where Tesla recently lost an attempt to block an HW3 lawsuit. For the AI/ML community, the litigation underscores growing legal and regulatory consequences when autonomy marketing outpaces technical validation. Key technical issues are the gap between HW3’s actual sensor/compute capabilities and advertised Level‑4/5 autonomy, the absence of delivered hardware retrofits or software upgrades, and the broader question of how to credibly demonstrate and certify safe, unsupervised driving. Outcomes could drive stricter standards for empirical validation, testing protocols, disclosure of system limits, and industry norms around over-the-air updates and liability — all critical for trust, deployment, and policy around ML-driven autonomy.