NSW man taken to Federal Court by Tesla over leaked whistleblower files – report

A New South Wales man has been ordered to remove leaked documents from the internet following court proceedings initiated by Tesla.

According to a report from Lawyerly, electric-car giant Tesla has sought the removal of thousands of documents relating to technical reports, customer complaints, vehicle repairs, and meeting notes, as well as those that include product testing, analysis, and design.

The Federal Court has ordered the man, from Crescent Head on the Mid North Coast, to take down the leaked files, which were part of 23,000 documents leaked by a company whistleblower and first published by German newspaper Handelsblatt in May 2023.

The whistleblower, a former service technician at Tesla, has also been sued by the car company in Norway and the US.

It's believed he uploaded the documents to a file-sharing website, where it was downloaded and disseminated across the internet by the man from Crescent Head.

The leak reportedly contained more than 100 gigabytes of confidential information, including 2400 complaints from Tesla customers claiming their vehicles "self-accelerated", with another 1500 allegedly reporting braking malfunctions.

The original report claimed the files contained more than 3000 incidents allegedly involving faulty driver-assist technologies, including more than 1000 vehicle crashes.

Drive understands the man named in the Federal Court proceedings has been known to have been waging an online war against Tesla for several years, and admitted to have lodged 37 complaints about Tesla suspension failures to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in 2016.

While his YouTube channel claims to "[blow] the whistle on GREEN SCAMS", he has also assembled an online photo album of alleged suspension failures from Tesla vehicles.

In December 2023, news outlet Reuters published a scathing article claiming Tesla was aware of widespread suspension failures on its vehicles, but continued to blame misuse from drivers on the components breaking – and in some cases, causing crashes, the report claimed.

Tesla hit back a week after the report, claiming the article was "wildly misleading" and was "riddled with incomplete and demonstrably incorrect information".