A group of Tesla Model S P85D owners in Norway have a victory to celebrate this week, amid some of the darkest, shortest days of the year (think six hours of daylight in Oslo): They’ve reached a settlement with Tesla over a lawsuit alleging they were misled about their cars’ power ratings and, by extension, its performance.
Tesla, at the time it introduced its all-wheel-drive, dual-motor P85D, wasn’t as precise as it could (and should) have been about the car’s power specs. The automaker then claimed a combined motor output of 691 horsepower, which was semantically true as the front and rear motors were rated at 221 hp and 470 hp, respectively, but potentially misleading as the maximum output for the powertrain as a whole was later confirmed to be 463 horsepower.
A company blog post from Tesla chief technical officer J.B. Straubel, published in 2014, defended that representation at the time, pointing out that motor-shaft horsepower is “a more consistent rating” and the one that’s actually legally required in the European Union. Battery power isn’t consistent, but through inverter hardware and software controls—potentially at times allowing the motors more power than the battery can produce—Tesla could have (and did) make that calculation of the maximum on a powertrain-wide basis.
As part of the settlement, reported by the Norwegian business publication Dagens Næringsliv, Tesla will pay about $7700 to each owner—half of what they had been seeking—to make up incrementally for the difference in power versus other Tesla models. That’s more than the approximately $6000 that had been offered to the owners earlier in the year as part of a ruling from Norway’s Consumer Disputes Commission. Under the new settlement, owners also will have the option to get a series of Tesla upgrades in lieu of cash, although reports don’t clarify whether those might have a retail value over the cash amount.
There are 126 Norwegian owners in the lawsuit. Tesla sold more than 1000 P85D models in Norway, which is Tesla’s second-largest market after the United States. EVs make up nearly a third of the current new-vehicle market in the oil-rich Nordic nation, which has incentivized EVs and exempted them from the country’s 25 percent value-added tax (VAT).
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