Consumers shouldn't need to do extended due diligence on the history of whether a company told the truth or not about what it's selling you over the last 15 years before making a purchase decision.
Information, power, and insight asymmetry between an individual and a company. That’s why there are consumer protection laws in many countries; to even the scales, not to favor individuals. With no hand on the scales, asymmetry is the default.
I 100% agree companies shouldn't be outright allowed to scam people
but if you're not at least reading the wikipedia page on a car and its manufacturer company before buying it looking for common "issues", that's kinda your fault
Maybe they shouldn't need to, but they do. Due to regulatory capture and deregulation (at least in the US), the law provides very little protection against scumbag companies.
But wouldn’t you feel like an idiot if you didn’t do due diligence and were conned? I don’t particularly like saying, “well the law was supposed to protect me…” in a case where my idiotic decision was completely preventable.
You say this as though it's trivial to just see that Tesla is a scam. There's multiple decades of fawning articles and reviews of Tesla to the point where the average person can't be blamed for assuming they're a reputable company.
But of course, blaming the victim is much easier because it lets the person doing the blaming pretend they're morally and intellectually superior in some way.
> You say this as though it's trivial to just see that Tesla is a scam.
I asked if a person would feel dumb that they had been conned.
Isn't the answer going to be yes even if that con is very sophisticated?
Paying a lot of money for self-driving when self-driving literally doesn't exist isn't that sophisticated of a con! They are telling you it doesn't exist! I know it doesn't exist and am paying for the hope that it will one day exist.
I mean sure make a law against this or whatever. But at the end of the day it's my money and no law can stop me from making a regrettable decision.
> But of course, blaming the victim is much easier because it lets the person doing the blaming pretend they're morally and intellectually superior in some way.
> You say this as though it's trivial to just see that Tesla is a scam.
You don't need any particularly deep due diligence to see that, in fact, not living under a rock is more than enough.
> There's multiple decades of fawning articles and reviews of Tesla to the point where the average person can't be blamed for assuming they're a reputable company.
There's multiple decades of articles highlighting, in various levels of detail, how exactly bad Tesla is and Teslas are. Checking for bad reviews and deciding how applicable they are to you in particular is part of rudimentary check
Sorry, but knowingly and deliberately buying a Tesla vehicle is entirely on the customer and they get in some sense even more than what they had ordered. Similarly, if you buy a ${brand-you-don't-like} you have no right to complain about ${common-problem}, because that's the state vehicles leave the factory.
> Sorry, but knowingly and deliberately buying a Tesla vehicle is entirely on the customer and they get in some sense even more than what they had ordered.
Clearly, the customers were not knowingly and deliberately buying bad cars because the evidence available to the average person told them the exact opposite thing.
EDIT: Strikethrough below, it was a result of a bad search but the principle above still stands.
Hell, even on Hacker News, the bad news only seems to have started appearing 3 years ago, and I know for a fact your average consumer isn't browsing tech sites to form their opinion for their next car purchase.
> Major problems reported with Tesla vehicles include vehicle reliability issues like suspension failures ("whompy wheels") and sudden power loss, alongside quality control concerns such as paint defects and poor build quality. Additionally, there are safety concerns surrounding the Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems, software glitches, and issues with customer service. Other problems include battery degradation over time, resulting in reduced range, and recurring HVAC system failures.
This is what google spews out when I type in "tesla major problems". The first result is Wiki entry "Criticism of Tesla, Inc.", where first section is literally "Fraud allegations".
All I had to do was look if there's negative feedback and it's not something mild what you would get replacing Telsa with e.g. Peugeot, but some really troublesome issues. If you don't agree that this is basic, rudimentary overview and instead argue that this is some deep research, well I don't believe we can agree on anything much at all. I invest more effort in picking a place to eat at than some people in buying their car.
Sorry, but there's no such thing as "bought it before Elon went crazy".
Financial fraud. This isn't something the average person is going to dig up on their own because they aren't going to start reading the FT and WSJ before they buy a car.
> This is what google spews out when I type in "tesla major problems".
Be honest: have you ever done this in literally any other context? In fact, don't bother because I know you haven't. Because nobody does this.
How do I know nobody does this? Because, as I evidenced above, Tesla's public reputation only started to decline in 2024/2025 when Musk started throwing Sieg Heils, sorry, "putting his heart out to the crowd" after Trump's inauguration.
> it's not something mild what you would get replacing Telsa with e.g. Peugeot, but some really troublesome issues
I did the same thing you did. Why is this important? Just to point out that, if you do your "due diligence," you can find major issues with any car make. Again, going back to the average consumer, you can't really tell the difference between reports of one car brand being shit vs any other.
Again, this is not to defend Tesla: this is to point out that it's really fucking difficult for an average consumer to know whether a trusted car brand is actually just taking them for a ride.
This kind of legal loophole might be common in the USA but in the EU is much harder to weasel out of obligations from the spirit of the law with legalese.
They can wrap as in many disclaimers as they want, if the law is clear that consumers had a presumption of delivery due to marketing promises which were unfulfilled they are on the hook for it.
It's why many American companies constantly complain about EU regulations, they empower consumers which is "bad for business™" since fraud becomes much harder to wrap in loopholes.
Consumer protections prevent such contracts. That is why companies acustomed to "defraud as much as you want, just keep it legally plausibe" hate them so much.
