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Elon Musk responds to German court’s decision to ban Tesla’s use of certain terms in ads
Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk fired back at a German court today after it was ruled that the company should be barred from using certain terms in advertising.
The court ruled that Tesla has used misleading advertising statements in regard to what its autonomous vehicles can do. Germany’s Wettbewerbszentrale, an industry-sponsored organization that deals with anticompetitive practices, brought the case before the courts, stating that Tesla had misinformed the public.
It argued that terms such as “full potential for autonomous driving” and “autopilot inclusive” should not be used in any of Tesla’s advertising, claiming that such terms might mislead the German public to think that the cars are fully autonomous. It said that using such terms could compel people to sit back and that could prove to be dangerous.
“Tesla Autopilot was literally named after the term used in aviation,” Musk tweeted after the decision. “Also, what about Autobahn!?” As with planes, Tesla has said that autopilot is not supposed to run without human intervention, rather it’s so far only an assistant.
Nonetheless, Tesla has been criticized for its use of language before. Employing the word “autopilot” in advertising some critics think might give people the impression that the technology can be used without human intervention. Tesla vehicles might come with the standard autopilot, but also what it calls full self-driving, or FSD. The latter still requires a human behind the wheel.
Around the same time that the German court was considering the Tesla case, a 23-year-old man driving a Tesla crashed into an unoccupied police vehicle in Arizona. The man, currently being investigated for driving under the influence, told police that he was driving in autopilot mode.
After fatal crashes over the past few years, Tesla has said that drivers need to stay alert even when in autopilot mode. The company said that autopilot makes crashes less likely to happen, but the technology is by no means self-sufficient. “No one knows about the accidents that didn’t happen, only the ones that did,” Tesla said in 2018 after a fatal accident.
Photo: Marco Verch/Flickr
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