5d ago

Tesla odometer uses “predictive algorithms” to void warranty, lawsuit claims

The lead plaintiff in the case, Nyree Hinton, bought a used Model Y with less than 37,000 miles (59,546 km) on the odometer. Within six months, it had pushed past the 50,000-mile (80,467 km) mark, at which point the car's bumper-to-bumper warranty expired. (Like virtually all EVs, Tesla powertrains have a separate warranty that lasts much longer.)

For this six-month period, Hinton says his Model Y odometer gained 13,228 miles (21,288 km). By comparison, averages of his three previous vehicles showed that with the same commute, he was only driving 6,086 miles (9,794 km) per 6 months.

Edit: I just want to point out that I just learned that changing your tires to ones of a different diameter can also affect how your spedometer clocks. So yeah, this issue is full of nuance and plausible things as to why this could not be true.

United States | News & Politics @midwest.social

pelespirit @sh.itjust.works

5d ago

Tesla odometer uses “predictive algorithms” to void warranty, lawsuit claims

arstechnica.com /cars/2025/04/tesla-makes-its-cars-lie-about-their-mileage-lawsuit-claims/

Tesla @lemmy.zip

BrikoX @lemmy.zip

5d ago

Tesla odometer uses “predictive algorithms” to void warranty, lawsuit claims

arstechnica.com /cars/2025/04/tesla-makes-its-cars-lie-about-their-mileage-lawsuit-claims/

144 comments

Good thing we have the CFPB to register and punish companies for shady practices like th...oh, nevermind.
- Wrong gutted regulator
  
  Or intentionally?

In the past, Tesla lawyers even initiated lawsuits against customers who dared to criticize the quality of their cars or services. Such cases are documented and therefore not fake news. Last week, moreover, DOGE dismantled the department responsible for safety control and approval of new cars entering the market. Tesla experienced too many problems with this department in the past and now, through DOGE, took the opportunity to simply dismantle it. Moral of the story... buy a Tesla, a “safe” decision.

It's far more likely that the odometer in Teslas are just poor quality crap like the rest of the car.
- We already know they knowingly lied about battery range, the capabilities of self driving, and a ton of other fraudulent practices. Tesla is doing it intentionally is more likely than poor build quality.
  
  In fact I believe the odometer reading is calculated from the electricty consumption, not from a meter in the gearbox. So if the range reading is inaccurate (and they are) it would throw out the mileage as well.
  Should be super easy to prove too… Take an assortment of Teslas to a 1 mile stretch of road, drive it up and down 20 times, measure the mileage before and after.
  Not necessarily, the incorrect readings may only occur at certain speeds or conditions.
  
  I’ll bite, what is the evidence that Tesla knowingly lied about battery range?
  
  Makes the range look longer, also.
- Odometers are one of the oldest consumer protection tools. If it's off, it's very illegal.
  
  Yup, odometers were regulated specifically to protect consumers from widespread odometer fraud. Shit like companies requiring oil changes every 5k miles, and the odometer shows 5000 when it’s actually only 4000, so consumers pay for more service than they need. Or cases like this one, where a company is required to provide a warranty until the 50k odometer reading, and then fudges the odometer so it voids the warranty sooner than it should.
- That cant be a defense?!
  
  When accused of crimes, deflect by admitting to even bigger crimes.
  
  I mean, VW tried to blame poor quality software (aka a bug) for their abnormal emissions, before it was discovered it's fully intended to cheat emissions testing.
  I wouldn't put it above Tesla to do the same here.
  
  Sorry officer, I'm just really stupid.
  
  Sure, but if you apply hanlon's razor whenever it's applicable, you're right more often.
  "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
- No, it isn't. Tesla's past behavior shows that they would definitely try to do this, because they would make a lot of money. And if the odometers were "randomly" poor quality, why would we only see reports of mileage being mistakenly high? Where are the mistaken low reports? Haven't seen any of those.
  
  Would most people notice that? Would they say something if they did? If this particular warranty is mileage based, I'd keep my mouth shut if mine was abnormally low. It's not like it's something that affects the functioning of the car, and has other potential advantages like higher resale value.
  And even if you said something, who is going to report on it? This is news because it's gone to court. You're not going to try to take them to court for it being low. At best you'll just try to get it fixed.
  I'm not saying this isn't something they would do, I just don't necessarily think we'd definitely see reports of it being low, even if it was happening.
  If they were actually doing this, and actually being smart about it though, they'd have it go over at a rate of say, 30% of cars, and under at a rate of like 10% of cars so they'd still come out on top but actually have it seem to be randomly faulty.
- Sure, but then you'd also expect to hear about Teslas with odometers that massively underreport the distance, too. Or that fail altogether. And while no one would be likely to report the former, the latter might be a bigger deal.
  
  Under-reporting mileage is an issue because you won't get the recommended oil checks at the right times, which will shorten your engine life. And it would be generally concerning to the owner, right? We really do assume the odometer is mostly accurate when we're going on trips.
  So I think people would be reporting it if it were happening, but they aren't, so it's probably not. Of course this is speculation.
- Had a Tesla Model 3 before, have a VW ID.7 now. They're driven the same and it looks like they both agree about the distances driven.
  FWIW
- all the models have defects, it just nobody complained enough that the news picked on it. i remmeber on reddit, some fanboy bought one for 140k or something around the time twitter was bought, everyone was quesitoning why he bought it at a volatile time.
- Even more likely there is a bug ticket in thier system that says some part is malfunctioning causing the odometer to count too fast. And that ticket has been depriortized by product management repeatedly as fixing it generates no increase in revenue.

The speedometer is also predictive.
- You know this is fake cause it's not on garbage touchscreen
- appropriate how 88 lines up on the dial...
  
  That's when you travel back in time to when things were still alright.
- From Berlin to Warsaw in one tank.
- Is it accurate though? Your mileage may vary.
- it gets stuck at 45 convenently

"Tesla commits fraud to void warranties."
There FTFY.

odometer += sensor * this_is_just_for_debugging_i_promise(odometer);

Changing your tire sizing only changes the speedo and odo a few percent. You can usually just ignore it unless you're making drastic changes.
- Yeah aeems a pretty useless edit for an obvious fact. Especially as in this case you would need tires half the circumference of the original to make sense.. Gotta be some tiny tires..
  Edit, had it the wrong way around
  
  Hey Siri how do I convert from inches to circumstance
- Yeah for the odo to do that, you need to put golf cart wheels on a Tesla.

Just literal fraud
- by Tesla?? I'm shocked
  
  Shocked I say!!!

That's 70 miles a day, for anyone who doesn't want to do the math. I don't know where Hinton lives, but that's almost two laps around all of the highways surrounding the city I live in. That's 2 hours of driving on surface roads, not including stop lights and stop signs.
I wonder how much money Tesla has saved by breaking the law this way?
- 112 km a day, not a bad commute by Toronto standards - it’s one way for the Barrie to Toronto drivers
  
  Sure, but it’s an additional 70 miles. Not something that would go unnoticed.
- Or about 11 swedish miles per day.
  
  What Swedish mile?
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_mile
  
  What's that in Ikea meatballs?

Add this to the pile of the rest of the illegal things billionaire Musk does simply because he can
- Better or worse than rape-via-twitter? Better, I guess.

For this six-month period, Hinton says his Model Y odometer gained 13,228 miles (21,288 km). By comparison, averages of his three previous vehicles showed that with the same commute, he was only driving 6,086 miles (9,794 km) per 6 months.
That's 2x. Seems too obvious to be happening on all teslas
- I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you my average monthly usage. I could definitely look at my oil change rate and work backwards, but it’s not just something I regularly think about or keep at the top of my mind. I’m sure plenty of people haven’t noticed it.
  
  I couldn’t tell you my average monthly usage.
  Open up your Google Maps (or navigation app of choice) and you'll likely have a record of how far you've traveled within a given time period.
  Subtract off any cab rides and rides in friends' cars, and that's your number plus or minus some distance in driveways or parking garages that the app can't accurately measure.
  
  Obviously UK consumer protection is different so they may not have the "feature" here, but cars get their milage recorded yearly (after the first 3 years) as part of roadworthiness testing, available online given the licence plate, so I can see I did 7041 miles in the last year.
  Does the DMV not have something similar?
  
  If you don't have an especially long commute, good chance you're between 12k to 15k per year. That's a typical yearly amount, and leases are usually set around there.
  13k in six months is about twice the average.
- Maybe multiplying each driven distance by the number of owners? I wouldn't put it beyond them if they code that crap with AI.
- The important bit in the article was that he had bought it used. I'm sure its not a standard feature for brand new Tesla, but I would absolutely believe that some kind of fuckery to keep pre-owned buyers from taking advantage of the warranty is SOP. It's counting double the miles, there's no possible way for that to happen on accident unless the odometer is completely independent of the cars systems.
  I'm pretty sure old odometers literally spun according to the wheels turning as you drove. If Tesla is "calculating" mileage then they would absolutely be able to just inject commands to ignore the correct algorithm and make it hit 50k as fast as possible. I'm sure most of the people they did this to weren't keen eyed enough to notice.
  Certainly not all Tesla, just the ones they think they can get away with. 38k miles is not very far from 50k, they assumed he would be a rube and just suck it up when they told him his warranty was invalid.
  
  It would absolutely not surprise me if Teslas calculate miles driven via GPS instead of tire rotation or some other mechanical means.
  It's the kind of "reinventing the wheel, only worse and more expensive" that Musk would do.
  
  I really doubt it, a lot of people would notice their odometer doing twice the work it should be doing.
  I think the most likely explanation is someone wrote down the wrong value.
- I definitely lean toward this being genuine manufacturing error (or user error).
  That said? Never underestimate the power of market research. I was just chatting with a friend about how neither of us understand cars beyond the most basic of emergency maintenance and I could 100% see a predatory system target us (moreso than the ones we know target us).
  Similarly, I would assume most former grad students are used to actually monitoring mileage because we are trying to push our crap for as long as we can. Whereas someone who has been a tech bro for a decade probably expects to buy a new car every time they get a bonus and wouldn't care.
  That said? Assuming this IS fraud on tesla's part (and that is generally a safe assumption), my money is on something like:
  The odometer nudging is designed to make sure everyone hits their mileage based warranty after N years. Every M months it will estimate your average use and "nudge" you based on heuristics. Hinton had a particularly low mileage the period before so it scaled them much higher for the next period while they were monitoring it.

A odometer is a smell sensor, no?
- They don't install those in new cars, you need one made in the ol'factory.
- How silly, it's obvious that would be an odormeter. An odometer is about something else entirely.
  
  Obviously!
- That's a smellometer!
  
  Let's use the Smelloscope!
- No
  
  But odor!

You can't change the tire size on a Model Y very much because of the weird suspension design.
- Plus, to double the mileage registered by using different size tires, you'd have to put a roughly 10" tire on a Model Y.

You mean the guy that thinks we live in a simulation and he’s the player and we are all NPCs is cheating to give himself an advantage? I’m shocked.
- Hah, I'm not convinced that interpretation is wrong. It's weird how influential he's been on the world, right?
  I mean if this is that sort of simulation, he'd probably be a player right? I know that as I get to the end of games, I get all the currency I'll ever need, I have all the best items, and the whole game becomes easy, that's about when I start becoming an asshole, testing the boundaries. Like "can I just kill this character? I'm gonna shoot them, just to see what happens. lol, the guards didn't like that much, look at em running around... I'll shoot them too".
  I think that's where Elon is right now, just being an enormous asshole just to see what happens. That's some gamer ass behavior right there!
  
  Because he was born rich and failed up his entire life?

That's sooo many individual felonies.
Yet another reason for Elon to wreck all the agencies investigating him.
- he said he was afraid to go to jail if harris won.

Should be super easy to prove too... Take an assortment of Teslas to a 1 mile stretch of road, drive it up and down 20 times, measure the mileage before and after.
- Right, but Tesla has had time to push new code to their cars. So we could get a negative result now and still have past shadiness.
  
  If the courts cared for the rights of people they would subpoena code routinely
  We can't be ruled by black boxes that serve people who hate us. It has to end
  
  There's got to be a git repository out there that has a smoking gun in its history...

Well I'm curious to find out what discovery will show.

Really needs to back this up with some corroborating evidence like Google maps location timeline or something. I don’t trust Tesla, but I also know when I switched to EV I started making excuses to drive everywhere. Practically free miles and great acceleration made driving a joy again. Also my wife and I would often swap vehicles if she had some errand across town to save on gas. Combined that out way more miles in my EV than I had been putting on the previous gas car.
If all this guy did is commute, then he likely has a case, but I really question that.
- Now now. There is a time to present that data, and that time is discovery, which has not yet begun.
  I know you want to judge the case now, but the legal system insists that you wait until the proper time, when both sides are gathering evidence and sharing it with each other.
- Yeah I'll be honest, I surprised myself when I bought my EV and my odometer went up a whole lot faster than it used to
  My previous car wasn't easy on gas so I instinctively used it sparingly. With my EV I actually do drive a lot more and I'm volunteering to be the driver for group trips and stuff much more often...

Why is proprietary in devices we purchase bad? This right here. We are connected to the internet 24/7. Companies hiding what they control and what they collect, which is bad.

Has anyone compared it to a GPS?
- Just fit your own dashcam. Some models have GPS logging so you can track where it is every second of driving.
  Another way would be to log OBDII metrics, and compare the vehicle speed, odometer and time. If you don't get s=d/t then something is up.
  
  The dash cam would work. I wouldn't trust obd because they could be sending the same info through or doing some VW diesel gate stuff. Maybe comparing obd to waze to what's displayed on screen would be better. When I mount different size tires on my vehicles I use waze to compare the speed on the speedometer vs waze. Most vehicles in the past read faster than it was going, it's only in the past few years I've seen them being more accurate, around when telemetry started being more prevalent.

Feels like they should be able to view the software and hardware controlling the odometer, and if it's doing anything suspicious.
I wonder if they'll actually do anything if they find Tesla is doing fraud. Feel like everyone who OK'd the decision should be barred from working in the industry for life, and made to forfeit everything they gained while doing the fraud.
While I'm making magical wishes, I'd also like Musk and all of his followers to choke to death.
- This is one case, right? If the judge finds against Tesla, everyone who had repairs occur within 10% or 20% of the warranty expiration date could be part of a class action suit, and probably that would be easy for them to win.

Like they can't even be competent enough to hire a hitman to kill their whistleblowers. Boeing are just laughing at them.

It is weird that he probably saw Danny DeVito rolling back the odometers in Matilda while in a K hole and misconstrued the whole situation. That scene of Danny with the drill taking thousands of miles off an old beater probably seemed like a jackpot idea in that drug addled mind of his.
- Hey man, drugs have nothing to do with his mind. It was that way before drugs were involved

Well, true, but tyres wouldn't make it a double distance, it's not that simple. The case isn't clear, if course, but the claim says that the odometer tried to reduce the range after it got out of the warranty period.
Not saying anything about the merit of the case, just the the claim itself sounds interesting and that if true, you can't wave it away with "you changed tyres".

Wow that's a scummy thing to do. Just like apple I will never buy a Tesla product.
- Apple’s odometers are fine.
  
  Pedometers, you mean?

It cannot possibly be legal to have the odometer show anything except actual miles traveled.
- Yeah I thought odometer fraud was like a serious thing, I wonder if it applies here.
  
  Yes of course that kind of fraud is serious. If it can be shown that Tesla is screwing with odometers in this case, they will immediately face a massive class action lawsuit from current and former owners, and their stock will tank even more.
  It affects routine maintenance, warranties, resale value, business taxes (based on the current value), and all sorts of other things. I think there is potential for other interesting legal issues, too. If Tesla is lying to the customers, then the customers are reporting false data to their insurance companies and state regulatory agencies. So there could be legal issues connecting to those groups as well.
- Yeah, I just closed the agency investigating my company so there is no enforcement mechanism. Legal alludes to a system I now own and control because it's better for me that way. Going to pass a few joke statues or pardon myself if there are any teeth left. Thanks fucking peasant.

Tesla? Muskrat? Engaged in fraud‽‽
Well I am just shocked, SHOCKED...well, not that shocked
- Very appropriate use of the interrobang.

Teslas are nothing more than heaps of junk, I just laugh at anyone driving a Tesla

Hinton's lawsuit alleges that 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" and that his car "consistently exhibited accelerated mileage accumulations of varying percentages ranging from 15 percent to 117 percent higher than plaintiff's other vehicles and his driving history."
Here comes Big Government, trying to constrain cutting edge innovations in accurately counting how many times the wheel rotates.
I hope DOGE is able to save California from itself by defunding whatever court system might be involved in persecuting hard working odometer engineers with this flagrantly Woke and Soy legal case.

Wow Teslas are even shittier than I ever imagined.
- when that dude on reddit bought one for 140k, and complained how it was all cheap plastics inside, and htis was the around the time he heel turned after buying twitter.

Maybe location tracking from Google maps giving a date when the car was driven and where, with a simple excel of distances calculated and tallied up for a given month or two.
If the owner had a photo of the dash with the distance reported a few months earlier start there to see if the report distance matches what the excel table totals up.

So instead of lasers for self driving, we got cameras because they’re like eyes and they can do the same thing. Now odometers, they spin and the number gets bigger. That’s like a slot machine. They need lots of numbers, so we’ll make them like penny slots and just go one little bit at a time, and it’ll make you feel like a winner when the parts fall off!

love how the article is so corpo that they have to clarify it's not the whole warranty that expired
as if any of that shit is real and not a scam
ars technica 🙄

Is this really about warranty or justifying the claimed range?
- Yes
- Warranty. Read the article.
  
  That's the accusation of the plaintiff, may not be the only reason for the company yo chest the odometer.

ha, ha, people getting screwed over by musk makes me laugh.

144 comments