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.

I’ve never been a fan of screens in cars. The last thing I want are “idiot lights” on a dashboard.

In 2020, Autoevolution highlighted “lack of physical buttons [in Tesla] as one of the worst automotive trends.”

Lo and behold the new Cadillac EV designers understand why touch means haptic, and they’ve delivered a proper sightless user interface.

And critics are raving:

I can’t overstate how comforting it is to have a bevy of physical knobs and buttons in a modern EV. More of this, please!

Safety feature, I would say.

(Firefighters cite Tesla’s “smooth” handle-free doors in slow painful deaths of occupants).

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).

Knobs and buttons give drivers true freedom from the visual prisons of “luxurious ignorance” vehicles.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Ronald Reagan killed all that American innovation so hard I never find anyone who remembers the awesome 1980 Lektrikar II based on a… Nissan.

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.

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).

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.

RIP Lektrikar.

California has finally passed a law prohibiting careless promotion of a car as fully self-driving when that car is incapable of self-driving.

Everyone knows what car company is in trouble when we talk about full of shit driving (FSD) technology.

The California law seems pretty clear, and also evidence that Tesla has run out of time.

Senate Bill 1398 means Elon Musk’s grossly misleading statements are officially against the law.

Headline at the end of 2015:

Elon Musk Says Tesla Vehicles Will Drive Themselves in Two Years

Half a year later in 2016 he sounded like this:

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.

And when that 2020 toxic fairie dust prediction failed, here he ramps up in 2020 again.

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.

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).

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.

Let that gaslighting sink in.

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.

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.

10 out of 10 “Driverless” Fatalities Were Caused by Tesla

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.