Suit: Tesla Jacked Up Its Odometers to Go Faster

If you own a Tesla that seems to be piling on the miles, you might want to pay attention to a new complaint—and your car's gauges. A Los Angeles man's proposed class-action lawsuit against Elon Musk's EV company alleges that odometers in Tesla vehicles were designed to rack up the miles more quickly so that owners would hit the mileage cap on their warranties faster, reports Reuters. Plaintiff Nyree Hinton alleges that the odometer on the 2020 Model Y he purchased in late 2022, with close to 37,000 miles already on it, ran between 15% and 117% faster than it should have, at one point logging a daily 20-mile drive as being closer to 75 miles.

Hinton claims that, because of his sped-up odometer, he reached the 50,000-mile mark, which is also the cap on his Model Y's basic warranty, in just six months, much more quickly than he felt he should have, per Ars Technica. That, he said, left him stuck with a $10,000 tab for a later suspension repair that he feels Tesla should've covered. To bolster his claim, Hinton showed evidence that the average mileage he accrued over six months with three previous vehicles, driving the same exact commute, never surpassed about 6,000 miles during that same time period.

Tesla "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," Hinton's complaint alleges. Jalopnik dives further into the technical part, explaining that Tesla has filed for a patent for a "seemingly tricky form" of mileage assessment, in which a 'miles-to-electrical energy conversion factor' ... would take in factors like charging behavior and road conditions into the calculation of miles traveled instead of a direct recording of miles traveled."

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Jalopnik notes there's no proof this technology is currently woven into any Teslas now on the road, but it adds that "there's been talk on forums about Teslas overestimating miles driven for years." Hinton is seeking compensatory and punitive damages for all Tesla drivers in the Golden State, though Ars Technica notes that in a previous case against the EV company, individual owners were told they couldn't form a class-action suit and had to go through arbitration instead. (More Tesla stories.)