Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times,
A federal appeals court blocked Tesla customers in California from pursuing class action claims that the company misled them about the hardware capabilities of its full self-driving (FSD) technology.
A class action is a lawsuit filed when a group of people or businesses suffer common injuries as a result of a party's alleged conduct.
For a consumer case to proceed as a class action, the buyers generally need to show they were all exposed to the same allegedly false statements in a similar way. Otherwise, each person's situation is too different for the claims to be tried together.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled on Oct. 16 that the case cannot move forward as a class action because every buyer's situation is different.
To sue collectively, the buyers would have to show that they were all exposed to the same allegedly misleading company-supplied information in essentially the same way.
The panel held that the plaintiffs could not show that every class member had seen Tesla's hardware claim - the company's assertion that its vehicles already had the hardware needed for full self-driving. The judges wrote that an assumption of exposure to the hardware statement makes sense with product labels, because "every purchaser necessarily has the allegedly mi
