Critics also say the Cadillac prices rapidly are increasing, with demand far above supply for at least a year out.
Any manufacturer discounting their cars right now to find buyers must be in serious trouble given how strong EV demand is for brands as wide apart as Cadillac and Chevy.
Yet more evidence that collapsing sales of Tesla has to do with the fact that they stole their original technology in 2006 and haven’t had a good idea since.
And on that note, since we were talking about luxury brands that understand the beauty of touch, the 2022 Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing comes default with a Transmisiones y Equipos Mecánico (TREMEC TR-6060) 6 speed stick to control its monstrous 6.2-liter supercharged LT4 V8 engine (668hp, 659lb-ft trq).
Cadillac’s Blackwing knob and button cockpit had critics raving long before an EV showed up embracing the feel.
Crashed and dead Tesla owners seems like the worst possible route just to get EV parts prices down from 1997 to 2022. Yet here we are.
In 2006 Tesla licensed 1997 electric vehicle (EV) engineering from an LA company that in 2003 had demonstrated 0-60 mph in under 4 seconds with a 300 mile range.
The tzero by AC Propulsion was the right car at the right time in 1997 though by 2003 it succumbed to President Bush cancelling electric vehicles in America. Tesla licensed then stole the technology to rush race car performance into public roads while falsely marketing it as safer, leading to hundreds of crashes and high fatalities. Source: AC Propulsion
It’s now the end of 2022 and what Tesla basically has achieved since then, aside from killing so many people unnecessarily, is the collapse of EV performance parts prices.
Early on I remember junkyards telling me that Tesla liked to “total” any vehicle even in minor collisions. That got the attention of engineers who knew the value of an abandoned tzero wolf under Tesla sheep paneling.
In one 2016 chop shop in Oakland the operator showed me how he’d buy crashed Teslas at $20k, put $10-20k into them and sell for upwards of $90k to buyers all over the world.
We ended up taking one of his private label rides out to test how easily we could force the Tesla computers into confusion, or even target one into crashing. (It was easy, far too easy).
Fast forward (pun not intended) and a LOT of Teslas have been crashing, leaving their 1997 tzero race car designs and debris scattered throughout junkyards.
Who needs an EV doing 0-60 mph in under 4 seconds? Especially who needs that bundled by a car company known for critical design flaws, such as unintended acceleration and brake failures?
Source: tesladeaths.com
Thank AC Propulsion engineers in the 1990s for their contribution to electric muscle, but then ask whether so many dead Tesla owners was the best way to “donate” EV parts into the eager hands of muscle car builders.
Erickson, whose renamed ”Electrollite” accelerates to 0-60 mph in three seconds… invites curious stares at public charging stations… At the end of 2019, Erickson, a cargo pilot, bought the [1972 Plymouth Satellite] for $6,500. He then embarked on a year-and-a-half-long project to convert the car into a 636-horsepower electric vehicle (475 kW), using battery packs, a motor and the entire rear subframe from a crashed Tesla Model S.
And here again:
Sean Moudry, who co-owns Inspire EV, a small conversion business, recently modified a 1965 Ford Mustang that was destined for the landfill. […] Trying to pack enough power into the pony car to “smoke the tires off of it” at a drag strip, Moudry and his partners replaced the underpowered six-cylinder gas engine with a motor from a crashed Tesla Model S.
It’s like anyone who really understands cars and wants a fast EV takes the tzero concepts and puts them into anything other than a Tesla.
More to the point, the hot rod industry is shifting away from picking through crashed 1990s concepts hidden under a cheesy Tesla badge. Hot rodders are back into actual modern innovations like we saw in the late 1940s and again 1970s (periods of energy instability).
“The early adopters of this would take a crashed Tesla and pull the motor and harnesses and batteries and all that out of the vehicle and find a way to shoehorn it into whatever vehicle they wanted to build,” Spagnola said. “But today there are many manufacturers now starting to make components. … We’re really excited about it.”
They talk about a crashed Tesla like there is no other source. That’s very problematic for many reasons. Nissan, for example, has 600K vehicles using its “driver assist” technology, and totally dominated the EV market, yet has reported zero crashes though this year.
Zero crashes.
You’d think the headlines would be all over Nissan’s success, and EV conversions would seek out Nissan. Or conversions would seek out Chevrolet.
The Chevy Bolt is hidden beneath this E10 concept. Elon Musk has criticized other car companies for having concept cars they never launch but it seems FAR safer than Tesla which launches unsafe concepts and unnecessarily kills hundreds of people.
But even worse, American car and oil companies had conspired with the government to prevent electric technology from being repurposed before the 2000s, even buying out successful EV startups just to make a secondary product market disappear.
No joke, engineers in Nevada working on things like nuclear waste and the mind-bendingly advanced Blackbird SR-71 plane had started an EV company that in 1980 looked ready to revolutionize the American car industry.
Retired electrical engineer Al Sawyer in 1979 founded a company that started to easily fly past requirements set by the government. He transitioned from building electric robots to handle military nuclear waste to crushing performance milestones in a production EV.
GM boasted then that the EV would be going into widespread deployment by 1985.
The car every American should know, yet none recognize.
Talking about the 2000s tzero fate is thus kind of a sad 30 year cycle, rising out of the ashes of politically dangerous post-war 1940s and 1970s EV engineering.
1997 tzero by 2003 was delivering EV performance that people in 2022 still think of as new.
With a big nod to Reagan’s dumb 1980s legacy, the American EV market was deliberately killed again in 2003 by President Bush.
The third EV market collapse driven by oilmen was different however, as we all know now, because a small group of individuals begged for government handouts to mass produce tzero’s EV muscle under a Tesla badge: dangerously fraudulent marketing claims about safety, self-driving, and environmentalism.
Tesla delivered the exact opposite of its three main claims, but government backers haven’t held it accountable and its failures have in meantime lowered EV parts prices.
In fact, as California started to talk real accountability and safety, Tesla ironically ran away to oil-centric Texas as if Enron never happened.
All that being said, it seems like the shadow of President Bush’s 2002 hard anti-EV campaigning (paid for by GM, Ford and big oil) finally is starting to disappear.
A lot of basic EV truths have been proven despite misrepresentation and heavy propaganda costs that deservedly dog Tesla.
If only AC Propulsion had been able to release its products through the 2000s under government subsidized contracts direct to race tracks and hot rodders (perhaps even through real upstart car companies like Nissan, Fiat and Kia).
The quintassential hot rod for everyone turned up as an EV in 2021, based on a Chevrolet Performance eCrate package to be released mid-2023. Source: ProjectX
As a final note, someone looking for real production EV muscle still probably wouldn’t want the death-trap Tesla. All the crashes likely are coming from people who don’t understand what they’re getting themselves into.
The Lucid Air Sapphire, for contrast, is for EV muscle enthusiasts: rates 0-60 mph in less than two seconds. Its 0-100 mph takes less than four seconds, with a standing quarter mile incredibly under nine seconds.
Lucid recently set a production car world record by posting a 9.1 second quarter mile, clearly leaving Tesla’s best attempts (an embarrassment to the word production) in its dust. It’s not just that Lucid looks far better and performs far better than Tesla, it’s a logical progression after AC Propulsion: started by real engineers who respect real engineering, which includes an ethical duty to do no harm.
The Tesla CEO spoke at the Code Conference on Wednesday night and predicted that we’re closer to self-driving cars than anybody thinks. “I think we are less than two years away from complete autonomy, safer than humans, but regulations should take at least another year,” Musk said.
Full self-driving announced in 2015 to be available by 2018?
Lies.
By the way, “regulations should take at least another year” means what? It’s an anti-government jab based on nothing. A subtle reminder that Elon Musk’s statements are fluffy nonsense meant to confuse and excite listeners.
Even worse, of course, is that when 2019 rolled around Elon Musk didn’t get charged with committing fraud and Tesla products were not shut down.
He instead was emboldened, taking a “catch me if you can” tactic and expanding the lies as if nobody would stop him if he added more outlandish claims.
Deadline long gone, missed entirely, he says this on stage in 2019:
We expect to be feature complete in self driving this year, and we expect to be confident enough from our standpoint to say that we think people do not need to touch the wheel and can look out the window sometime probably around the second quarter of next year.
Feature complete yet it won’t have necessary features. Nonsense.
Here is how journalists reacted to his presentation in 2019:
Musk estimated that by the middle of 2020, Tesla’s autonomous system will have improved to the point where drivers will not have to pay attention to the road. […] “A year from now, we’ll have over a million cars with full self-driving, software… everything.” These cars will be Level 5 autonomy with no geofence, which is a fancy way of saying they will be capable of driving themselves anywhere on the planet, under all possible conditions, with no limitations.
“Full self-driving…everything”.
That egregious lie about delivery is not even the worst of it. Here’s more from 2019.
“My guess as to when we would think it is safe for somebody to essentially fall asleep and wake up at their destination? Probably towards the end of next year,” he said. “I think we will be feature complete, full self-driving, this year — meaning the car will be able to find you in a parking lot, pick you up, and take you all the way to your destination without an intervention — this year. “I would say I am of certain of that. That is not a question mark.”
Elon Musk was encouraging people in the very near future to fall asleep at the wheel.
I remain confident that we will have the basic functionality for level five autonomy complete this year. There are no fundamental challenges remaining.
Basic functionality and level five autonomy completion are inherently contradictory phrases.
It’s like Elon Musk telling journalists that he expects to have basic functionality for brain surgery complete this year because he can handle a turkey carving for Thanksgiving.
And he callously boasted about all fundamental challenges to road safety being gone already in 2020.
That seems like an especially dangerous statement that would confuse buyers; directly result in death from use of his defective products.
Source: tesladeaths.com
Tesla “driverless” still in 2022 is repeatedly failing the most basic tests like staying in the road and driving the correct speed (lane assist + cruise control).
Tesla “Autopilot” crashed and burned trying to turn left on highway 405 when it curved right. Source: Business Insider, December 2022
Other car brands with superior sales numbers have zero crashes at all to report, while Tesla’s “driverless” software crashes so often it has been implicated in over 50 deaths.
Lies and lies and more lies…
Fast forward (as it’s so rediculous we even have to talk about such lies repeating year after year) and Tesla’s self-driving right now is a literal disaster with tragic investigations into hundreds of crashes.
The investigations come despite excessive censorship by Elon Musk, including attempts by Tesla to demand anyone using FSD be prevented from talking about their experiences.
Tesla employee John Bernal (YouTube: @AIAddict1) was fired in February 2022, for example, after he publicly shared a video of FSD crashing into a safety pylon.
Tesla announced on November 24 it expanded its version 10 “beta” (10.69.3.1) self-driving software release to everyone in North America. Hours later a major crash of eight cars in SF was the headline news, not to mention a crash and explosion in LA.
Version 10 still gets called a “beta” to avoid accountability, announced to everyone as a production milestone to gin up credit, right before being implicated in major crashes on public roads.
And also don’t forget the CEO told Wall Street in January 2022 that a version 11 “beta” was just weeks away from release, and then just said the same thing in December 2022 as if nobody sees the fraud.
Source: Twitter
This prediction for a December release also came after he chided people that he thought v11 already had been released the 11th day of the 11th month at 11:11 Pacific time.
No other car company so flagrantly flails at truth like this, yet you can be sure all of them are watching and wondering how much longer Musk’s crimes will pay.
Thus, as everyone surely knows, Tesla since 2016 has repeatedly falsely marketed itself delivering self-driving in the coming year or two, sadistically increasing pain with zero connection to reality of their promises.
Reality has been a rise in death caused by Elon Musk peddling unsafe design flaws for profit.
Tesla autonomous technology 2.0 was worse than 1.0… everyone with integrity ran from the corruption.
Mobileye, world leader in autonomous driving, was blunt in 2016 about willful negligence.
Mobileye reveals it split from Tesla over Autopilot safety concerns.
NVidia was unfortunately far more diplomatic in 2018 when they called out Tesla management as liars and thieves.
Musk said Tesla’s [copy of NVidia] was 10 times faster than Nvidia’s at the same cost. Nvidia, though, has announced its own next-gen chip for autonomous driving called Pegasus, also with 10 times better performance.
Soon after that, NVidia published a study that ranked Tesla’s cheap knock-off engineering culture as least capable of all car companies.
Indeed, the Tesla CEO falsely claimed in his trash-talking split with NVidia that he was developing a vehicle computer that would never crash. The results are in and even brand new Tesla owners are terrified:
…if you are driving, and the computer crashes, which it has done many times, you are left with a blank screen – and no way of knowing what your car is doing.
Under a permanent improvisation culture of an unaccountable chief executive, Tesla safety quality declined with each year such that late releases of FSD software has been documented as more dangerous than ever.
Baseless future-leaning statements served both to artificially inflate stock value as if self-driving basically was delivered; yet also Tesla self-contradicted promises of near-term delivery by calling them longer term aspirations (to avoid blame for failing to deliver what they promised to wall street, while killing so many people).
Fraud.
It’s a simple tactic of criminals, known often as advanced free fraud (AFF), where victims are lured into paying into promises about fantasy returns that never can be realized.
Instead of the typical AFF scam email from an “African prince”, the South African CEO of Tesla promised people enrichment from giving him their money. Then they saw their car depreciate faster than the market average, if the car didn’t burn itself up or worse, and none of his promises came true.
California has just laid down a regulation ten years overdue.
Tesla undeniably made roads far less safe by negligently selling full of shit driving (FSD) software and falsely calling it self-driving.
There is no evidence Tesla has any clue what to do next, which is sadly consistent with their cars lacking real innovation since they first licensed and then stole a 2003 EV design.
Since I wrote a post a few weeks back — looking at the huge Fiat EV sales numbers in Germany — I’ve been curious about the Stellantis rise (Fiat is a Stellantis brand).
It seems odd that Tesla is soaking up headlines in Germany while failing to deliver, shooting itself in the foot and above all lacking innovation for the tenth year in a row. Nobody meanwhile is writing about the Stellantis revolution delivering amazing results.
The Stellantis boss plans to launch 75 new fully electric models by 2030. The group’s annual sales should double by then to around 300 billion euros – with a double-digit return on sales.
Seventy five EV models within a decade. Wow.
Another one of Stellantis’ brands dominated last month’s EV sales in Germany, for example. This time it’s the French “DS” that takes honors.
Germany’s Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt (KBA — motor transport authority) published new figures that show DS registrations in November were up 301%, followed by MG with registrations up 124%, and then Audi up 109%.
Looking at the “luxury” marketing I don’t immediately see the DS appeal versus a Polestar, for example.
“Only you, a wealth of attentions”?
Wat.
Why is that all-black faceless woman staring into oblivion while the “only you” is a white man in white? Is that an apparition, like he’s meant to be seaside for mourning the death of his mistress?
It must sound and look better in French, or French translated into German.
My guess is this new DS EV is an amazing feat of engineering that sells itself because the marketing is… let’s just say “schnauzer”.
Since nobody seems to be writing about the DS having huge appeal in Germany, it’s even more curious how they’re crushing very recognizable and highly curated brands like VW and Audi.
It kind of reminds me how Tesla somehow manages to splash itself into Norwegian news, while the modest Nissan LEAF like Stellantis has quietly dominated that country’s all time EV sales.
The story of Nissan’s LEAF, the world’s first mass-market EV launched a decade ago, is woven into Norway. In 2018, for example, it was the country’s most-sold passenger car. A 2020 survey of 14,000 EV drivers in Norway – thousands of them Nissan LEAF owners – showed that nearly 95% are satisfied with their cars and 66% are encouraging their friends to follow their lead. Maria is definitely one of those drivers. “For those who have not yet switched, try this car. You won’t regret it,” she says. “As soon as you drive it, you’ll see how wonderful it is to drive a Nissan LEAF.”
Seriously, there’s great EV stuff going on if you look at the real numbers instead of cooked ones from the Tesla propaganda pulpit. Let’s see some more talk about super cool Nissan innovation for Norway’s snowy roads, engineering that fundamentally changes an EV that Norwegians buy the most.
e-4ORCE offers a powerful and controlled drive with a lightning-fast response and smooth acceleration with ultra-high-precision control at 1/10000th of a second. It guarantees driver and passenger comfort and steadiness while delivering thrill and velocity matched with a sports car.
Nissan innovation is impressive, especially now that their CEO is not crazy.
