A B.C. couple recently purchased a 2019 Tesla Model 3 from North Shore Acura in North Vancouver. The ad for the used Tesla indicated Autopilot was included on the vehicle, something which was confirmed after the dealership inquired directly with Tesla about the features on the car.
As it turns out, that wasn’t the case. According to a report by CTV News Vancouver, the couple Paul and Hiroko Auger discovered once they got home the car did not have Autopilot.
“We would not even have looked at that vehicle if it did not have the feature … it’s a safety feature for my wife after working 12 hour shifts at night,” Paul Auger told CTV News.
This was confirmed when Auger downloaded the Tesla app and saw on the upgrades tab a previous purchase for both Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) had been refunded.
After some investigating with the help of CTV News, they were able to find the previous owner of the vehicle, Jonas Renaud, who confirmed he had butt-purchased both options when he owned the Model 3.
North Shore Acura has attempted to correct the situation with Auger, but he has so far declined. He instead wants the dealership to pay for the upgrade.
“We’ve apologized and offered numerous times to unwind the deal and make the customer whole. We can do this in a way that has a very little impact on the customer,” said Dustin Davis, regional general manager of Dilawri (the owners of North Shore Acura).
Who is to blame?
This story appears to be an unfortunate mistake that began when Tesla confirmed in writing the vehicle had Autopilot. Given this was a 2019 Model 3 purchased in March, just months before Autopilot became standard on all vehicles, we can only assume the advisor who sent the email made an assumption the feature was included without actually checking.
That doesn’t absolve the dealership, who with a little investigation by going through the options on the display of the Model 3 could have seen it was not included.
The new buyers are also partly to blame. The dealership confirmed the couple test drove the Model 3 before signing on the dotted line. If Autopilot was as important to them as they make it out to be, they should have tried to use it on their test drive. They also should have noticed Autopilot wouldn’t turn on soon after leaving the dealership and before driving two hours to their home in Pemberton.
Deleting your personal information
Another important thing to remember is to delete all your personal information from your car before you sell it. In an interview with Drive Tesla, Renaud said he’s unsure what personal information was used by CTV News to track him down. He suspects it could have been his email address used to log-in to the video-streaming service Netflix.
When he traded it in to a broker, the process happened very quickly and took less than an afternoon. As a result, he simply forgot to do the simple, but important step of performing a reset on the car.
If you are going to be selling your Tesla, you can delete your personal information by going to the Service menu and selecting “Factory Reset.”
You can watch the report by CTV News Vancouver below. Let us know in the comments who you think is to blame?
