Tesla shareholders are suing the company, Elon Musk, and a few current and former leaders for securities fraud over its ‘Robotaxi’ launch in Austin.
The lawsuit emphasizes that expanding Robotaxi services is critical for Tesla amid declining demand for its electric vehicles and other challenges, but the company failed to disclose risks to regulators, the public, and investors.
The complaint alleges that Tesla and its executives made materially false and misleading statements, inflating the company’s stock price by exaggerating the readiness and safety of self-driving vehicles, particularly the Robotaxi.
Specific claims include:
- Repeatedly overstating the effectiveness of autonomous driving tech and its financial prospects for Tesla.
- Elon Musk’s statement on an April 22, 2025, conference call that Tesla was “laser-focused on bringing robotaxi to Austin in June.”
- Tesla’s claim on the same day that its approach would deliver “scalable and safe deployment across diverse geographies and use cases.”
- Concealing risks highlighted by a late June 2025 public test of Robotaxis in Austin, Texas, where vehicles reportedly exhibited dangerous behaviors such as speeding, sudden braking, driving over curbs, entering wrong lanes, and dropping passengers in the middle of multilane roads without proper safety measures. This test allegedly led to a 6.1% drop in Tesla’s share price over two trading days, erasing about $68 billion in market value.
Electrek’s Take
For now, the lawsuit appears more like a fishing expedition than a serious matter. I don’t like lawsuits that use stock price movements to claim damages.
However, in this case, as I’ve been reporting for months, I do think that Tesla did the ‘Robotaxi’ launch purely for optics with a system that is not ready to be unsupervised and valuable.
Tesla did it because it is not capable of delivering on its long promise of unsupervised self-driving in consumer vehicles, and Waymo is making it look bad by actively deploying and expanding autonomous ride-hailing systems.
It needs to start to look like it is in this competition, even if barely.
The deployment of autonomous driving systems should prioritize safety as the primary driver, rather than optics. In this sense, the lawsuit can make some sense as it will be damaging to investors when Tesla’s house of cards of autonomy comes crumbling down.
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