A Chinese driver has successfully sued Tesla Inc. for fraud over his purchase of a second-hand Model S, adding to a run of setbacks for Elon Musk’s electric-car pioneer in one of its most important markets.
A Beijing court found Tesla had misrepresented the condition of the car bought by Han Chao for 379,700 yuan ($58,700) on the automaker’s official used-car platform, according to a copy of the verdict Han posted to his Weibo account. The car was found to have undergone major repairs following an earlier accident, with the court dismissing Tesla’s defense that signs of welding indicated no “structural change.”
Tesla was ordered to refund the cost of the car and pay damages of three times the purchase price – taking the total payout to more than 1.5 million yuan, according to the copy of the ruling Han posted. It’s the first time Palo Alto, California-based Tesla has been hit with such a large penalty in China, local media outlet Caijing reported. Calls to the ruling court, Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court, went unanswered. Tesla shares fell 0.6% to $776.84 as of 9:42 a.m. in New York.
While Tesla has won legions of loyal fans around the world, in China it has also tangled with a number of vocal disgruntled customers, who have used social media campaigns to rally support. In the most high-profile case, a female customer clambered atop a Tesla exhibit at April’s Shanghai auto show in a protest that quickly went viral.
Read more at https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/9/30/driver-in-china-successfully-sues-tesla-for-fraud
