Correct me if I’m wrong on this. If I drive ten miles from Point A to Point B, the odometer on my car should advance … ten miles. Correct? Good.
Now try driving that same ten miles in a Tesla.
And now your odometer says … 25 miles driven??
That’s the argument behind this California class action lawsuit, claiming that Tesla’s odometers track a different mileage pattern than distance, causing Tesla vehicles to exceed their mileage warranties more quickly than they should.
Car and Driver Blog explains it better than I can. Apparently, Tesla calculates their mileage based on energy consumption and driving patterns, rather than how many times your tires rotate when they’re on the road. And if the mileage increases faster than actual travel distance, then that would mean your Tesla’s “x years or y miles, whichever comes first” warranty would have a “whichever comes first” moment pretty damn quickly.
And that could equate to odometer fraud.
Odometer fraud was a big issue for used car salesman way back in the day. Some intrepid car dealers could figure out how to pop open the dashboard and roll back the odometer a few clicks here and a few clicks there, essentially giving you the appearance of a low-mileage car with a high-mileage engine. Which you don’t want to discover when your engine fails 20,000 miles before you presumed it would.
The class action lawsuit alleges that the odometers on Tesla vehicles would cause the car’s warranty to end quickly, thus saving Tesla repair and parts costs – which, in turn, would be shoveled onto the car owner. Ecch.
Now this is only a class action suit, the legality of how this will play out in court is still up in the air. But it just gives me one more reason to stay away from Tesla vehicles, and stay tied into to my Chevrolet.
That’s reason number, what, five hundred thirty-six?? 😀
Chuck The Writer 
Yup, on its face this seems like a deceptive practice.
But if this feature was at all disclosed and explained up front – let’s say buried in the owner’s manual, or as standard fine print in the gobbledygook of the sales contract language – then “caveat emptor” might enter the argument.
And any resulting class action payout could then be nominal, maybe enough to cover a complimentary jolt.
But at the very least, this screams for some kind of (grandfathered) technical fix.
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