The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is investigating two rear-end crashes involving Amazon-owned Zoox self-driving cars and motorcycles.
The case was opened on Friday with an Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) preliminary evaluation that summarizes the circumstances of the two crashes, both of which involved a Zoox-powered Toyota Highlander braking suddenly and then being rear-ended by a motorcycle. One of the motorcyclists received minor injuries their crash.
The Tesla situation is like watching something out of a film about the fall of communism.
Parking lots full of Tesla vehicles are becoming impossible to ignore as the electric automaker seemingly can’t sell enough cars and trucks to match its rate of production. According to its own figures, the electric automaker produced 46,561 more vehicles than it delivered to customers during the first quarter of 2024. Where are all these cars going? Parking lots at its factories, malls and airports.
Remember, for example, how the Trabant was such a “hot” car claiming decades of demand until suddenly in 1989 (fall of the wall) centrally planned low-quality production was dumped into huge parking lots full of unallocated inventory?
It was like overnight Trabant demand went from a five year waiting list to… we gotta get away from car communism… to nobody wants one.
History will be unkind to Tesla owners.
Tesla now has similar problems related to its centralized plans dispensing angry hate towards the dealers who serve local markets. It’s basically attempting to pretend it doesn’t need local dealers while renting huge parking lots to hold unsold inventory… like local dealers.
The difference versus other car brands that sell inventory through distribution and many communities, instead of depending entirely on fealty to one man, is resilience. Central planning of dictators tends to be full of such fraud that it abruptly falls, like the wall.
When dear leader no longer can fraudulently allocate inventory and hide the lies, it’s over. One signal has been that Tesla can’t seem to keep a lawyer in the job of overseeing the centralized lies.
Well known risk benefits of distributed systems make Tesla’s childish attempts to run an extreme centralization experiment look like unnecessarily high risk, especially now as the Elon Musk brand looks in danger of sudden collapse.
To put it simply, Tesla new model plans likely are cancelled due to capital shortages. Staff are being fired week after week, decimating entire departments and crushing morale, causing shortages that drive up cost of operations. Quality control was skipped to dump Cybertrucks on unwitting customers, which now pile up service debt. Price/rates of all models dropped, leaving bare minimum margins as global inventory piles up in parking lots; factories burn cash pumping out cars to cost money sitting in a rented lot.
And again, Tesla can’t seem to keep a lawyer in the job of overseeing the centralized lies.
It’s a death spiral, which is why Tesla just went to China for an emergency loan (selling customer data).
That case brought to mind what a “driverless” planned attack on critical infrastructure could look like, given how these remotely controlled robots are operating without regulation on public roads.
The thick black tire skid marks, a utility pole knocked to 45 degrees… apparently all that was foreshadowing.
Today from Pasadena (just 20 miles away) we have even more shocking and tragic news, with almost the exact same “veered” storyline into a pole, and three more dead.
The tragic incident unfolded at approximately 2:38 a.m. when a Tesla Model 3 veered off the road and slammed into an unoccupied building in the 2300 block of Foothill Boulevard, according to Lt. Anthony Russo of the Pasadena Police Department.
[…]
Investigators planned to look into whether the Tesla’s autopilot feature was engaged at the time of the crash.
Russo said the driver lost control at a curve and hit a curb, sending the vehicle into the air. It then struck two city light poles, a utility pole, and a building and caused a widespread outage that left an estimated 500 homes and businesses in the dark.
This time Tesla took the infrastructure down like an unguided missile.
Surveillance footage from the area shows the moments that the Tesla hurtles down the street and runs through a red light shortly before a bright flash can be seen, which is presumably when the crash took place.
Police say that the driver, 22-years-old, was going at least double the 35 mile per hour speed limit, if not closer to 100 miles per hour.
Runs a red light. Double the posted speed. The Kamikaze inside this robotic munition was 22.
Ban Tesla on national security concerns? It seems obvious when you read the news every day.
A clumsy unguided Russian large bomb often is configured to blindly spread hundreds of small clusters of explosives, which will make a targeted area uninhabitable for generations of civilians and military alike.
The UK Ministry of Defence is trying to get the word out that Russians are increasingly being bombed by Russia.
Such incidents appear to be becoming increasingly common, with [Russian independent Telegram channel] Astra reporting that “at least 21 aerial bombs” had accidentally been dropped by Russian forces on Russian or Russian-occupied territory between March and April 2024.
As you can see below, in just one example from a single Russian bomb, thirty Russian homes with ten cars were destroyed.
To the outside observer these are huge problems with major consequences.
Training failures and fatigue are suggested, although the elephant in the room is an alternate perspective, how the dictator doesn’t care about bombing his own citizens, just like he throws away his troops’ lives. Training and rest don’t fix problems that are never allowed to be seen as problems.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
