Self-driving Teslas are killing people

Germany’s largest automobile club, ADAC, issued a public recommendation that Tesla drivers should carry emergency window hammers. In a statement, ADAC warned that retractable door handles could seriously hinder rescue efforts. Even trained emergency responders, it said, may struggle to reach trapped passengers. Tesla shows no intention of changing the design.

That’s Musk. He prefers the sleek look of Teslas without handles, so he accepts the risk to his customers. His thinking, it seems, goes something like this: at some point, the engineers will figure out a technical fix. The same logic applies to his grander vision of autonomous driving: because Musk wants to be first, he lets customers test his unfinished Autopilot system on public roads. It’s a principle borrowed from the software world, where releasing apps in beta has long been standard practice. The more users, the more feedback and, over time – often years – something stable emerges. Revenue and market share arrive much earlier. The motto: if you wait, you lose.

Musk has taken that mindset to the road. The world is his lab. Everyone else is part of the experiment.

  The Guardian

This is a harrowing story of Teslas crashing and burning people alive.

Tesla has another sad week

 

The world is serious about pulling away from us. As they should be.

D'uh

 

Doesn't sound like "may" is the right word.

If you're making $17,000, you simply cannot afford to lose $700.

Also...

Somebody needs to file a lawsuit.

Musk "stepping back"

Elon Musk said Tuesday that he will take a major step back from his work as the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency.

[...]

Musk said on Tesla's earnings call that "my time allocation to DOGE will drop significantly" likely starting in May, declaring the effort "mostly done."

"I'll have to continue doing it for I think the remainder of the President's term just to make sure the waste and fraud that we stopped does not come roaring back, which it will do if it has the chance," Musk said.

  Axios

They didn't stop any waste or fraud. In fact, they added to it.

Very Trumpy. Claim success and leave.

"I encourage people to look beyond the bumps and potholes of the road immediately ahead of us," he said. "Lift your gaze to the bright shining citadel on the hill — I don't know, some Reagan-esque imagery — and that's where we're headed."

LOLOLOLOLOL

He also claimed, without evidence, that Tesla protesters are "receiving fraudulent money" from the government: "That is the real reason for the protests," he said.

His comments came after Tesla acknowledged, for the first time, that the backlash might be hurting the company's financial performance.

Fraudulent money? I don't even know what that is. At any rate, no one's paying anyone to protest Tesla.

Sad!

Grifters and cheats all the way down

 

Snowflake

 

Tesla Takedown Day

 

They know

 

Trump 2.0 - Wholly owned subsidiary of Tesla, Inc.

Tesla shares fell early Thursday after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick used a TV appearance to urge Americans to buy stock in Elon Musk's car company.

[...]

"I think, if you want to learn something on this show tonight, buy Tesla," Lutnick said on Fox News Wednesday evening. "It's unbelievable that this guy's stock is this cheap. It'll never be this cheap again."

[...]

His recommendation was potentially overshadowed, though, by one of Tesla's most fervent defenders on Wall Street calling the company's situation a "crisis."

[...]

Tesla shares were down about 1.7% in premarket trading Thursday to $231.75.

The stock is down 5% in the last five days, 35% in the last month and 42% so far this year.

"We struggle to think of anything analogous in the history of the automotive industry, in which a brand has lost so much value so quickly," JPMorgan analyst Ryan Brinkman said in a research note last week.

Lutnick's comments are part of what has effectively become a Trump administration campaign to defend Tesla.

Last week President Trump held a public showcase of Tesla's cars at the White House.

Amid a wave of "Tesla Takedown" rallies at dealerships nationwide, top administration officials have pledged to investigate protesters for domestic terrorism.

[...]

Just hours before Lutnick's comments, Cantor Fitzgerald — the investment bank where he was previously CEO, which is now managed by his sons — upgraded Tesla's stock.

  Axios

LOL

Tesla could have other problems besides Musk's politics affecting its stock.

Save Tesla!

 Poor pathetic Elon.  They're reduced to hawking his tanking product.  Sad! 

Giving them away?  LOL.  Or maybe the "details" include giving money to Trump.

Tesla owners are finding out. Even dressing their Teslas up as something else.

UPDATE 03/13/2025:

President Donald Trump absolutely despises green energy. He regularly boasts that he is killing the “green new scam,” which means he’s terminating as many of his predecessor’s investments in renewable energy as he can. That could have an immensely detrimental impact, leading to far fewer electric vehicles on our roads—and far fewer factory jobs constructing them.

But after careful deliberation about what truly serves the national interest, Trump has now made one considered exception to his dislike of green technologies.

[...]

This bizarre eruption is worth dwelling on, because it opens a window on the perils of what political theorists describe as our national descent into “clientelist” rule. It attempts to reduce the federal government’s actions and functions to instruments for rewarding friends and punishing enemies.

[...]

Trump is moving to roll back federal subsidies for electric vehicles, attempting to cripple plans to build charging stations nationwide, and reversing tailpipe pollution regulations meant to encourage the E.V. transition.

According to a new Repeat Project study, all this could cause E.V. sales to drop by 40 percent in 2030, relative to Biden’s policies.

[...]

Now Trump is using the power of the presidential bully pulpit to encourage people to buy electric vehicles that happen to be the leading product of his top billionaire crony and campaign benefactor—as a display of loyalty to both of them. This jarring contrast—E.V.s are bad, and the federal government must not incentivize them; but buy Teslas because Trump’s top ally deserves gratitude and devotion—shows that there’s no discernible conception of the national interest animating any of this.

[...]

Why does Trump care about Tesla’s sales, anyway? Most crudely, Trump doesn’t like it when charts and metrics reflecting on his presidency go in the wrong direction. Right now, Trump is contending with charts showing the markets tanking over his tariffs, charts showing his net approval sliding, and now, charts showing Tesla’s stock plummeting. Charts going down look weak. Charts going up look strong.

[...]

Trump notoriously does not believe polls. But one metric he pays attention to is business success. The president knows his fortunes are now inextricably entangled with whatever Musk authors, and the stories about Tesla sales tanking are a metric of Musk’s failings that are clearly cutting deep with Trump. As his angry midnight rant displays, he knows that metric is very much going in the wrong direction.

[...]

[Trump is] instituting a system based on favoritism and graft, while openly sabotaging procedures designed to safeguard neutrality in public service. Trump’s undisguised vow to shape energy and tax policy to benefit wealthy donors, his firing of inspectors general who are insufficiently dutiful to him, his mass purges of civil servants to give way to loyalists, his selection of top law enforcement officials who openly promise to target his enemies—all these reflect this change [from a depersonalized beaurocracy to a clientelist government].

[...]

Musk’s ascension represents a striking twist to all this. Trump has delegated him extraordinary power over the government, yet he is almost entirely unfettered from mechanisms of basic accountability. [...] [T]he government is now shaped around the personal interests and whims of not one man but two.

What Trump has discovered is that his own public standing is yoked to Musk’s. The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie has observed that in empowering Musk, Trump is putting his presidency in the hands of a figure “who is accountable to no one but himself,” and if the consequences of his DOGE cuts strike, “Musk can walk away,” leaving the mess with Trump and the GOP.

  New Republic

Trump never was very good at seeing past the present moment. He functions on a reptile brain, reacting to stimuli and seeking only personal gratification.

Trump hawking Teslas

 

Your president has turned the White House into a car sales lot.

Well, Musk bought him, so I would expect nothing less.

UPDATE 03/12/2025:

"Illegal" boycott?

 

Not sure that's gonna help Tesla.  Subsidizing the price of Tesla vehicles might work.  That's gonna be hard to do without subsidizing all electric vehicles, but I'm sure Trump can find a way.  It wasn't that long ago when he was trash talking electric vehicles to promote the oil cartel. 

Also, who's gonna drive it?  

Cash poor?

 Most billionaires are probably cash poor.  Who has billions of dollars in cash?  But they have options.  

Still, I don't mind if you keep protesting Tesla.

Defund Nazis!

Tesla protests

 I've been seeing images from various protests at Tesla plants.  I like this one.

I believe that sign says "We hate him too."

UPDATE 03/11/2025:

Oh, what a surprise

 

Now, there's your waste and fraud.

UPDATE 02/14/2025:

"Musk's soft underbelly"

 Ewwww.

NOLA terror attack addendum

UPDATE 07:21 pm:  Curiouser and curiouser...

A Tesla Cybertruck burst into flames outside the front doors of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas on the morning of Jan. 1, killing the car’s driver and injuring seven more.

Emergency personnel said that two people were hospitalized as a result of the apparent attack.

Authorities described the explosives in the vehicle as a combination of fireworks, camping fuel and gas tanks, according to CNN.

[...]

The electric vehicle was obtained via private rental app Turo, according to a law enforcement source who spoke with the Associated Press—the same app allegedly used by a man who plowed into a crowd of New Years’ revelers in a truck on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street early Wednesday morning, killing 15 people and injuring more than 30 others. Authorities are also investigating that mass killing as an act of terrorism, and whether the two acts were connected.

  Daily Beast

UPDATE 1/2/25:

While officials have not confirmed a link between the Las Vegas explosion and the New Orleans pickup truck attack, both suspects served in the Army.

President Biden said Wednesday that authorities are still working to determine if the two incidents were connected. Both suspects used vehicles from the peer-to-peer rental app Turo.

Matthew Alan Livelsberger was a member of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) and was "on approved leave at the time of his death," an Army spokesperson told Axios in a statement Thursday.

  Axios

The Trump team completely expected response:

Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL), who President-elect Donald Trump has tapped as his national security adviser, said Thursday that the incoming administration should respond to the attack in New Orleans—which was carried out by a U.S. citizen from Texas—by closing the border.

“First and foremost, close our border,” Waltz, a former Green Beret, said on Fox & Friends when asked what should be done to protect the nation from further attacks.

  Daily Beast

Three guesses, first two don't count

Is it just me, or do there seem to be an inordinate number of Teslas catching fire?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 03:44 pm:

Video of the explosion from a security camera:  

During a press conference, LVMPD Sheriff Kevin McMahill shared that the sole victim was inside the vehicle during the explosion.

[...]

Elon Musk has also added that the whole Tesla senior team is investigating the incident, adding, “We’ve never seen anything like this.”

  KOLOTV

UPDATE 07:24 pm:

The user who first posted a video of the explosion said that the car immediately burst into flames after parking at the hotel’s valet stand.

[...]

The electric vehicle was obtained via private rental app Turo, according to a law enforcement source who spoke with the Associated Press—the same app allegedly used by a man who plowed into a crowd of New Years’ revelers in a truck on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street early [this] morning, killing 15 people and injuring more than 30 others. Authorities are also investigating that mass killing as an act of terrorism, and whether the two acts were connected.

  Daily Beast

UPDATE 1/5/25:   A thread about the perpetrator:

Does President Musk have access to Trump's Truth account?

It could be that Trump has just picked up Muskisms from hanging around with him.  On the other hand, that post does seem a bit more elaborate with language - as well as being somewhat sophisticated - and cogent - than Trump generally is.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 01:05 pm:

A typical Trump post with which to compare and contrast:

UPDATE 06:44 pm:  Ron Filipkowski thinks Stephen Miller wrote the earlier post...

Christ.

Gee, what a surprise

Vivek Ramaswamy said that it is likely that the DOGE committee run by himself and Elon Musk will recommend that the $6.6 billion loan to Tesla competitor Rivian be revoked. The loan is being made so Rivian can build a new plant in GA. Not too much of a conflict of interest here. Maybe GA Gov Brian Kemp will have something to say about this.

  Meidas Touch

And what difference would that make?

Sarah Kendzior has been trying to tell us for years that this was coming.

Sarah Kendzior:  Intermission