Tesla has made itself about as exciting to car buyers as a gutted Studebaker on blocks.

“What’s a Studebaker”, kids will ask.

“Exactly”, their parents will say.

German regulators have inspected the Tesla truck and found it fails the most basic safety tests by design.

German authorities state that the vehicle’s structure is too rigid and therefore does not provide occupants with the mandatory safety. Furthermore, the rigid body panels are a nightmare when it comes to pedestrian protection, as the front bumper and bonnet of a car needs to deform in order to absorb the forces in the event of an accident. …enormous forces act on the occupants. Airbags no longer help.” As a result, “it will not be possible to sell it as a mass-production vehicle in Germany based on type approval.”

People inside and outside the Truck will die unnecessarily.

A total engineering failure… by design!

Tesla literally based its “best” attempt on ideas so stale and old, so unsafe by modern standards, they can’t be sold.

And on top of their absence of innovation, thinly clothed to look tough and “new” (both exposed as lies in their premature pitches), delivery has been far behind their own schedule.

Late and unsafe.

It reminds me when Tesla had announced a delay to release their batteries, which soon after started bursting into flame. Since then it’s been putting whole neighborhoods at risk, draining emergency response time and budgets.

What’s the Tesla battery fraud fire death toll now, 50? That’s more than double the Ford Pinto.

The Tesla truck at this point is basically little more than an overdue project out of someone’s high school chop shop, in an attempt to copy Dodge engineers, that isn’t street legal and never will be.

Who would pay for such amateurish nonsense when they could buy any production EV truck delivering far superior engineering at far less cost?

Ford, an unavoidale example, just won NA Truck of the Year award for its EV. The “Lightning” was in a final competition round against the Chevrolet Silverado ZR2 and a Lordstown Motors Endurance.

North American Truck of the Year is the latest award in the F-150 Lightning trophy case. Others include, Motor Trend Truck of the Year, The Car Connection Best Car to Buy, Edmunds Top Rated, Detroit Free Press Truck of the Year, Green Car Reports Best Car to Buy, TIME Top 200 Invention of 2022, 2023 Kelley Blue Book Best Buy Award, 2022 Altair Enlighten Award, Sobre Ruedas 2022 Awards, Wards 10 Best & Engines & Propulsion Systems, Internet Brands Best Car to Buy, Victory & Reseda Vehicle of the Year, TopGear.com 2022 American Car of the Year, Autoblog Technology of the Year 2022, Motor1 Star Awards, CarBuzz Save the Planet award and multiple Sabre awards.

I’ve hated Ford my whole life and still do, but have to admit that regulations have really turned that company around.

All those awards should go to the people who created the higher standards for Ford to achieve.

Kind of like how strict antifa-planned occupation of Germany by the U.S. Army converted that technologically backwards country into a leader in car manufacturing.

Real history: Ford stole from the Dodge brothers and used his immoral wealth to fuel the rise of Nazi Germany.

…Henry Ford admitted that the Dodges made the entire Ford except the body, wheels and tires and that they also risked much financially while Ford himself invested no money or property…

I’m just saying if the American military had occupied Detroit more like they did Berlin and Tokyo… Ford would have been regulated into innovation and had a modern EV on the road in 1947 more like Nissan.

And that’s why today we talk about the Nissan LEAF totally dominating EV sales globally for years while having minimal defects and zero “automation” crashes to report.

The venerable Japanese “Ni-hon San-gyo” (NiSan) truck maker was restarted to produce EV and by 1960 had won the Deming Prize for superior car engineering (Deming helped lead U.S. Army statistics, including the occupation by Supreme Command of Allied Powers). Ford quality by comparison through those same years… NOT good and very late, yet still it’s at least several decades ahead of the regressive death trap Tesla.

In related news, the amazingly innovative Korean Kia EV6 won the award for SUV against a Korean Genesis GV60 and despite the awesome knobs of the hot American Cadillac Lyriq EV.

See what car experts are saying?

At this point people who really know cars regard the tone-deaf Tesla a stale and burned slice of toast — a total non-contender among fresh electrics.

Sorry Studebaker fans.

I took four people [including the L.A. Times auto editor] for a [Studebaker] ride at speeds from 166.6 to 172.5 mph, and in each instance I let go of the steering wheel for several thousand feet…

What is it with these people pulling an Elon Musk and encouraging drivers to take their hands off the wheel? And now the brand is dead. Idiots.

Even the notoriously “3rd place” Dodge truck line is far better engineering already in every way than any Tesla, and that should say it all.

… customers can boost the power output of their [Dodge SRT Banshee powertrain package] to 400 kW (535 hp) with an eStage 2 “Crystal,” while the 440 kW car can produce 500 kW (670 hp) with an eStage 2 tune. It’s not yet clear what the 800-volt powertrain will deliver straight from the factory or what the tunes may boost, but that’s some considerable power…

800-volt? Sign me up! Stellantis is a powerhouse of future vehicles.

But an anti-hacker “Crystal” feature…? Um. Is Dodge going to brand their next EV the Fairy or Unicorn? “Crystal inside” just doesn’t have the ring of “hemispherical (HEMI) FirePower”. Was “cylindrical” (CYLI — pronounced “silly”) unavailable for Dodge to brand its battery-fed engines? Imagine having a CYLI funny car.

Dodge marketing (and right-to-repair resistance) is as dumb as ever (3rd place, did I mention?) but you have to respect their awesome safely engineered muscle, especially in trucks.

Bottom line: German vehicle safety experts (thanks to U.S. Army occupation) wisely have ruled nobody should buy a Tesla. Unfortunately the U.S. Army was prevented from doing in America what it achieved abroad.

And that’s why so many Americans today may be expected to die in avoidable Tesla tragedies, as if 1930s Tatra T87 “owner suicide” taught some Americans nothing.

Korean news makes the Tesla seem like a Chinese made cruise missile was fired onto their busy roads.

Some 50 firefighters and 17 engines were mobilized and it took more than an hour to put out the flames.

That’s a LOT of wasted emergency response and environmental destruction for just one car.

It almost sounds like a plot from North Korea to destroy their enemy with Chinese cars made to explode by design, as I’ve said many times before since at least 2016.

The news even calls it “another Tesla caught fire” (via translation).

A driver was seriously injured when another Tesla caught fire in Sejong administrative city on Monday. According to firefighters, the EV burst into flames at around 10:30 p.m. Monday night when it crashed into a rail dividing a road in the northern part of the city and collided with an oncoming vehicle. The accident caused severe burns to the back and legs of the 36-year-old driver, who is being treated in hospital. 

And then they bury a lede.

Last Saturday, a Tesla Model X also caught a fire due to a battery-related abnormality in Seoul. 

In very related news (e.g. maximum mileage of a Tesla has decreased from 400km to 100km per charge due to engineering flaws), the Korean FTC early in 2022 told Tesla to stop blatantly lying about its battery safety.

Tesla very quietly edited its false and misleading content in response.

That didn’t go nearly far enough, apparently, as the FTC has hit the notoriously untrustworthy car maker with a sizeable fine for fraud.

The company made false and exaggerated claims about the distance its electric vehicles can drive per charge and the specifications of its supercharger, according to the FTC Tuesday. The antitrust agency added that Tesla made deceptive claims about cost savings for customers using its vehicles compared with gasoline cars. The FTC fined Tesla 2.85 billion won ($2.24 million) for the advertising violations and another 1 million won for not providing customers sufficient information on canceling orders.

Customers who discovered they had been misled and tried to cancel their orders were charged high exit fees. Tesla is obviously such a desperate and insecure brand, symptoms of fraud, nobody should go near them.

The problems with Tesla’s BMS are known to occur mainly in the 2018 to 2021 models, including the Model S, Model X, Model 3, and Model Y.

“Mainly”? That’s basically all the models you could buy. Korea also reports the car can burst into flames while in a Tesla service center!

…a Tesla recently went up in flames while it was being checked at a service center due to a battery problem. A large number of comments about Tesla battery problems have been posted on the website of the Automobile Recall Center at the Korean Automobile Testing & Research Institute (KATRI) since November last year.

For those paying attention, service center fires that destroy Teslas are not new.

Amsterdam firefighters in 2018 reported multiple Tesla were destroyed during service. One desperate owner used Twitter to try and find his $140k vehicle, but it was never to be seen again. All he recovered was his $1000 suit dumped by Tesla in a garbage bag.

Still a problem. And only a Tesla problem.

It seems like that one million won is far below what the fine should have been, especially since the entire EV market is directly harmed by Tesla’s barrage of falsehoods, poor engineering and life threatening entrapment.

Even more concerning is that the FTC admitted they lack appetite for regulation of bogus autonomous claims.

…FTC “concluded it’s difficult to conclude that consumer misconception related to autopilot violated the law,” said Nam Dong-il, director at the consumer policy division at the FTC, at a press briefing on Tuesday.

Wat.

That nonsense is definitely going to get Koreans killed, which is what I’ve been warning (again, since at least 2016). They could take a lesson or two from Japan, California and Germany on that front.

Come on Korea, you know what to do.

Ban Tesla on grounds of fraud, anti-competitive practices as well as national security risk. Literally any other EV is better and you know exactly why.

Total Tesla Fires as of 1/11/2023: 168 confirmed cases | Fatalities Involving a Tesla Car Fire Count: 50

Make that 170.

Tesla is banned on and around military bases in some countries for good reason.

Korea’s own car manufacturers are world leading innovators creating some of the best EV options on the market, precisely because they aren’t run with Pyongyang-levels of fraud like Tesla.

The Kia EV6, regarded by critics today as perhaps the best EV in the world, enjoys demand far higher than supply and certainly above targets. It’s high quality, innovative, plus a blast to drive (better performance and handling than Tesla). And it’s safe.

• 2023 Kia EV6 Earns IIHS Top Safety Pick Plus Award
• 2023 Kia EV6 Wins North American Utility Vehicle of the Year (after winning 2022 European Car of the Year)
• The Kia EV6 Is So Good It’s Even Winning Awards That Aren’t for Cars

There’s really no good reason to allow deathtrap Chinese Teslas to operate on Korean public roads. And there are many reasons to ban them, not to mention send their CEO to jail.

And what people don’t understand there is that the competitors have been subsidizing Tesla. Basically, Tesla is getting paid for them not to develop EVs. So the idea that Tesla’s presence somehow forces everyone else to make EVs is really not true. It’s the opposite. Tesla’s maximizing those credits [with dangerous fraud and lies].

Tesla is so prone to failure, you can be sure their “no holiday” culture always will be ruining someone’s holiday somewhere.

I’ve written here about a Thanksgiving fire and Christmas fire already.

Both were horrible tragedies for people who unfortunately had a Tesla in their neighborhood.

It’s time now of course to write about New Year’s Day.

This incident is smilar to a recent Megapack fire in California that shut down a major highway and forced residents to “shelter” from toxic fumes.

The fires in the energy storage systems at Moss Landing are reminiscent of incidents involving Tesla Megapacks in Australia. […] California Highway Patrol closed a section of Highway 1 and redirected traffic away from the facility for hours following the fire.

Here’s the Australian news they referenced, just to reiterate Tesla’s willful disregard for safety is an environmental disaster.

Australia’s Financial Review reported that the fire triggered a toxic smoke warning, and authorities instructed residents in nearby suburbs to close their doors and windows, and turn off heating and cooling systems.

Another large Tesla battery “pack” just burst into flames January 1st.

The proprietary charging model of Tesla is the opposite of smart. Can you imagine failure rates if Ford required Ford gasoline from Ford stations? Tesla’s horrible closed minded engineering means you don’t have to imagine.

Members of a Tesla driver’s Facebook group reported waiting nearly three hours to charge their cars…. On Twitter, a Tesla car owner who braved the queue said: ‘Really upsetting to have whole family wait for two hours to charge car.’

Friends and family don’t let friends or family near anything to do with Tesla.

Tesla fires also are more dangerous than just environmental disasters and long wait times. Deaths have been dramatically increasing due to flaws made by inexperienced and rushed Tesla engineers, who are notoriously exhausted and yet being overworked by design.

When an employee asked the CEO for time to see family he was reprimanded as “definitely not on board with Tesla’s mission and values.”

Forced into long hours without breaks, including lack of holidays, workers turn into zombies with a “Tesla stare“.

The [Tesla CEO] wanted [employees] who were tough, unemotional and unempathetic and who had weak attachments to others, and [he] understood that withholding [benefits] would support that goal.

Even more to the point, Tesla safety declined predictably as basic health and safety were denied. All because a CEO doesn’t demonstrate any care about others, only about himself.

Mega failure after mega failure…

They just can’t seem to get their cars right.

NHTSA Campaign Number: 22V844000
Manufacturer: Tesla, Inc.
Components: EXTERIOR LIGHTING
Potential Number of Units Affected: 321,628
Summary: Tesla, Inc. (Tesla) is recalling certain 2023 Model 3 and 2020-2023 Model Y vehicles. One or both taillights may intermittently fail to illuminate.

It’s hard to understand why anyone would buy a Tesla. Have they not read the NHTSA files?

The NHTSA for example points to 11 safety complaints already recorded for the 2023 Tesla Model 3.

The prior models were dogs too: 2022 Model 3 had 9 safety recalls, 2021 had 13, and 2020 had 14… a huge number for a company caught repeatedly lying about safety and implicated in over 50 deaths from design defects.

In one case, as I’ve written about before, Tesla’s recall response was pushed without proper engineering allegedly making safety incidents worse than before the recall.

Pushing a recall fix that makes safety even worse is… unbelievable, yet also on brand for a car company that hasn’t innovated since 2006. In fact, in 2021 I clearly warned of this problem and then watched as my warnings were proven accurate.

Given that the bug appeared in the first place, what is to prevent an even worse bug from being deployed to cars on the road at any time and in any place?

Here’s what the start of 2022 looked like for new Tesla owners:

NHTSA ID Number: 11471044
Incident Date February 20, 2022
Consumer Location DURHAM, NC

While driving at a normal speed and turning around at an intersection in our neighborhood, the car suddenly went out of control, causing the car to hit a fire hydrant in front of a home, smashed a tree before crashing into the siding of the home. Insurance deemed the car as “totaled”. We were reimbursed by insurance so this is not about monetary losses, but a report to protect other drivers and their families. The Tesla database records mentioned user acceleration and error, but this doesn’t sound like a reasonable cause. The airbags didn’t open and neither did the automatic emergency braking or forward collision warning work. I was unable to brake and control the car to stop. This accident is captured in the security system video of the impacted home.

I find this all the more fascinating when compared with the Nissan LEAF. Nissan quietly dominated EV sales in 2018 and outsold Tesla in important EV safety test markets like Norway. Its LEAF reigned as the all-time top selling plug-in electric car through December 2019.

What were the Nissan LEAF safety recalls over all these same years that Tesla failed so hard at safety?

Nissan delivered a near perfect record or one flaw.

LEAF turned in safety engineering scores that should have been headlines for the EV market.

And even more to the point, while Tesla’s ill-conceived full-of-shit “driverless” (FSD) has crashed hundreds of times needlessly, Nissan recently posted that its own “pilot assist” operating nearly 600,000 cars had zero crashes to report.

Zero crashes while zero recalls!

It’s an amazingly modest yet dominant engineering position.

People talk about EV being new but cars have been electric since the first cars.

Nissan’s own timeline (first EV mass production) goes all the way back to the late 1940s US occupation of Japan. Their mass production Lektrikar famously blew away 1980 performance requirements for EVs.

People talk about Tesla like it’s an early mover, yet it’s very, very late.

As the world’s first mass-market EV, LEAF has secured unprecedented achievements. In 2011, it was the first-ever EV to win the World Car of the Year award in the 47-year history of the prize. […] LEAF introduced unprecedented technologies that helped drivers optimise efficiency, including the innovative e-Pedal for one-pedal driving, regenerative braking and Eco-Mode.

And people talk about Tesla like it is a big player, yet it’s very, very small.

The number of public charging points increased hugely over LEAF’s life, from 2,379 in the EU in 2011, to 213,367 today.

Tesla not only has far fewer charging stations, sales are less than 4% of all EV vehicles in the EU. It’s barely registering, and on some top 10 EV lists such as Germany and Norway the Tesla models don’t show up at all.

Tesla year after year has made wildly boastful “coming soon” claims to confuse and excite people. And as a result it appears distracted, weak and exhausted, unable to even connect bat to ball — putting owners and everyone around them in serious risk of injury or death.

Meanwhile, Nissan absolutely hit the ball out of the park with its innovations and EV engineering.