Fine print in contracts can't override and totally negate specific offers made in marketing or the sales process.
If they said "$x gets you y", ran ads saying "$x gets you y", held press conferences saying "$x gets you y", then gave you an invoice showing you pay "$x for y", a backing contract saying "$x does not get you y" will not stand up in court.
So in addition to not being legally okay, it's obviously not "ethically questionable." Taking people's money and not delivering value you promised to them in exchange is bad.
Courts generally know that people don't read fine print, much less understand it. So if there is something courts see as a promise that people will see and understand they will tend to decide that when the fine print is in conflict with advertising they tend to assume that there is an intention to deceive and so they will punish you for it.
When reading the above, think: the opposition lawyers have incentive to present the case that way. Judges rarely stop them. Juries tend to accept the above presentation. Of course the other side has lawyers that will try to pick apart that argument. It is anyone's guess what the jury (and thus court) will decide.
There are many different legal systems in the world. The above is a US perspective. I cannot comment on other countries, just know that each is different. Even if Tesla wins in court in the US, they can still lose a lot of money in other countries that work different.
Since Tesla thinks they are clever by not running "ads", but instead relies on their own "viral marketing", they may find it rather upsetting when they go through discovery and there are heaps of internal memos talking about how it is important to market the idea that they are selling FSD forward, very directly misleading customers.
> Tesla only admitted in January 2025 that HW3 won’t be able to support unsupervised self-driving. Musk claimed that Tesla would retrofit the computers, but there has been no word about it for 10 months.
Software isn’t the problem. It’s the hardware, and they promised upgrades.
If they said "$x gets you y", ran ads saying "$x gets you y", held press conferences saying "$x gets you y", then gave you an invoice showing you pay "$x for y", a backing contract saying "$x does not get you y" will not stand up in court.
So in addition to not being legally okay, it's obviously not "ethically questionable." Taking people's money and not delivering value you promised to them in exchange is bad.