Court finds Tesla's "Full Self Driving" to be "corporate puffery"

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Originally published at: Court finds Tesla's "Full Self Driving" to be "corporate puffery" - Boing Boing

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Coming soom: Tesla supports full submersibility mode! It’s not Tesla’s fault if the users fall for this puffery, and drown (before catching fire)

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“puffery” isn’t available in the dictionary.

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That his fanbois still consider him to be a business genius after statements like this really speaks to their own low standards.

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That’s surprising. It is a legitimate word that comes up in cases like this all the time. Also in false advertising cases. It can also come up in what lawyers are and aren’t allowed to say during negotiations. You can’t lie, but normal “puffery” is allowed. In other words, you can’t say “We have proof that your client lied in their deposition” if that’s not true. But you can say, “Look, we’re very confident that a jury will find in our favor, and a million dollars now would be a lot cheaper that what that jury is going to award us,” even if you don’t believe a word of that.

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“The court determined that I am full of shit, and therefore you cannot believe a word I say! Winning!” is probably not the flex he thinks it is…

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A similar flex to the one used by faux news-“we’re just entertainment! No reasonable person would believe a word of what we claim!” That one worked too, alas.

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Look at all the sensors on a Waymo car. Look at all the sensors on a Tesla. Wonder why Elmo’s “Full Self Driving” is killing so many people? Because he’s beta testing the experiment on the public. If they die, they die in service of his dream of a world where no one is ever allowed to drive their own car. “To save lives”.

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It’s a general principle in UK advertising law that adverts are merely “puffs” unless they make specific, verifiable claims. A good example is Fairy Liquid, a dish-washing soap, which for decades has been advertised as lasting twice as long as rival brands. A rival brand took them to court for it, an experiment was done, and Fairy was found to last twice as long. The slogan was allowed to stand.

I’m not sure how “fully self-driving” can be measured.

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Lay all the crashes end to end.

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Yes, but humans crash too, though.

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I’m happy to count each and every crash in a car with “self driving” enabled for legal and insurance/compensation purposes.

Each and every one of them with multipliers as failure mounts.

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This is exactly what one would expect from Musk specifically, but in a more general sense I really wish we didn’t live in a world where humanity seems to have collectively decided to just give up on actually inventing cool future tech and instead simply pretend that we’re already there. A child aspiring to become a baker might make “pies” out of mud and that’s all normal and fine, but an adult doing it and legitimately trying to sell them as though they were real is just sad and pathetic.

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Crashes per miles driven. Or fatal crashed per mile driven. I believe normal humans score one per somethingclosc to a million miles driven. At one point Waymo was kind of exciting because they were closing on two million miles driven and nobody had been killed.

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… if a Tesla kills somebody and Musk has to pay for it, that will prove it was driving itself

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Did they also test whether hands that do dishes can feel soft as your face?

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No. That slogan had been abandoned for the one about lasting twice as long.

I actually use Fairy myself, because it is a very good cleaning agent, but the whole family has got a feeling that the formula has been thinned down in the past couple of years. A form of skimpflation? It’s not something I can test. Besides, what if all the other dish-washing liquids have also been thinned.

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While Villabajo is still being affected by the shock wave the fallout is already settling
on Villarriba.

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… if Tesla were selling robot lawyers with Full Self Legal Advising, something tells me the judicial system would not let it slide like that :thinking:

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There are tests people have to take to get driver’s licenses. Can the car pass one?

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