San Francisco gets a nod from the BBC as one of four cities in the world that are making positive change by actively reducing vehicle traffic, which of course increases quality of life.

This northern California city moved quickly during the early pandemic to launch Slow Streets – a programme that used signage and barriers to limit car traffic and speeds on 30 corridors in an effort to make them more pedestrian- and cyclist-friendly. According to data collected by the city, the programme saw a 50% reduction in vehicle traffic, a 17% increase in weekday pedestrian traffic and a 65% jump in weekday cyclist traffic.

Tesla is drunk. Someone take its keys away.

The car company has fired up its lawyers in a completely tone-deaf and self-defeating missive in an attempt to censor people their CEO doesn’t like.

Tesla is demanding an advocacy group take down videos of its vehicles striking child-size mannequins, alleging the footage is defamatory and misrepresents its most advanced driver-assistance software.

Arguing that reporting on a crash test dummy in a car safety test is a defamatory act, has to be one of the dumbest arguments I’ve ever heard.

It’s a test.

It’s a test using a crash test dummy.

The test results of testing with a crash test dummy are real facts.

Even worse is when you put this nonsense about test accidents in context of Tesla trying to chill speech about real accidents; saying their safety failures shouldn’t be counted when the car is damaged in an accident. So they don’t want you to talk about safety before an accident, and they don’t want you to talk about safety after an accident.

Guess where that leaves safety for a Tesla?

Also I must point out that I’ve given many, many talks over many years about Tesla safety shortcomings where I specifically call out their inability to see pedestrians. In many of those I clearly advocated strongly for this EXACT TEST using a crash test dummy (inflatable balloon, etc) in a street because it reveals the truth by reporting Tesla failures.

We’re talking here about an infamously outspoken unfiltered CEO who aggressively pretends to believe in absolute free speech, while in reality he sends out huge legal teams to censor people.

It reminds me of Peter Thiel (South African like Elon Musk) pretending to want absolute free speech and then sending armies of lawyers to censor people he doesn’t like.

Answering the obvious question of “why don’t electric cars have solar panels” the new Lightyear wants you to take a look at theirs:

In optimal conditions, the solar panels can add up to 44 miles a day to the 388-mile range the car gets between charges, according to the company. Tests carried out by Lightyear suggest people with a daily commute of less than 22 miles could drive for two months in the Netherlands without needing to plug in, while those in sunnier climes such as Portugal or Spain could go as long as seven months.

That 44 miles estimate might just be related to the fact that an average round trip to and from work in the U.S. is around 40 miles a day. And in many cases cars just sit all day in a sunny parking lot.

Going seven months between charges might also be expressed in time saved.

If people spend 10 minutes a week filling up gas (including time getting to/from stations), or more recently time spent finding a plug and then waiting for batteries to charge, then that seven months figure could turn into hours of life not wasted.

I suppose we could argue whether it’s far more efficient to run a giant array of stationary panels with a plug, yet this misses the point about classic problems of ownership, bureaucracy and “right of way” related to infrastructure.

The U.S. has around 145,000 gas stations, but only about 6,500 fast-charging stations that can power up a battery quickly for a driver on the go.

It can take some people months just to get a charger wired into a house, let alone months or years to get solar panel plans approved by utilities who hate them.

Thus someone with a simple apartment or condo in Florida (no rights to put a charger or panels anywhere) might still want to keep a car sitting around for a week or two at a time in a sunny parking lot charging WITHOUT DEPENDING ON CENTRALIZED OR MANAGED INFRASTRUCTURE THAT MAY NEVER COME… and then drive it short distances to the grocery or hardware store.

Lightyear makes a lot of sense in places like Florida, or even Wyoming for that matter.

What if I told you Tesla is a giant Ponzi scheme?

Hopefully you’d correct me and say no, it’s actually much worse, and then explain the big difference:

In classic Ponzi scheme analysis people will lose all their money.

Ponzis of today are a whole lot more complicated and a whole lot more careful about how they dupe investors into giving them money. Tesla is a perfect example…

Or as others put it:

So long as Tesla’s stock continues to rise, they can continue to lose money doing business every year, and still profit – for themselves and previous investors – from the proceeds of new investors. And they can do this indefinitely, so long as they get continued investment. Sure seems like a Ponzi scheme.

In the Tesla case, however, people not only give away their money and fail to see it return but also may suffer from an awful result of slow asphyxiation before being burned to death.

Accountability? Too late for victims who unfortunately agreed to cough up money into a car-maker’s fear-driven scheme, then die abruptly while waiting for safety promises that can never come.

Musk stated that any Tesla bought today [in 2019] is an “appreciating asset” due to its potential to be used to generate revenue in the future.

Appreciating asset? Seriously?

Such a market-juicing statement was only three years ago yet hundreds already are dead. Even more to the point, value of a 2019 Tesla (assuming of course it hasn’t abruptly caught on fire or crashed into a police car) has depreciated at least 25%.

Tesla will only be a depreciating asset. It delivers engineering quality basically on par with a 1990s Kia; how many of those saw valuation go up?

And Tesla is worse because doesn’t just fail to appreciate, it depreciates faster than the industry average while killing people who invest (or those around them). Failure looks like cars being destroyed completely and/or unnecessary deaths.

Tesla owner blows up Model S instead of footing $22,600 repair bill. This Tesla owner has had enough.

Furthermore, Musk has openly criticized early victims in his scam, calling them fools for investing in his notorious inability to deliver.

“The early Model S’s probably had the worst seat of any car I ever sat in,” Musk said.

It doesn’t get any better, if that’s what you’re thinking comes next. Even when you agree with the CEO his seat is the worst of any car, Tesla replaces it under warranty with… the same failure.

My driver’s seat bottom, Model S, 2017, was very uncomfortable and made my legs ache if I drove more than 1 hr. I took it into the service center and they said they couldn’t do anything. It just so happened that the Service Manager was walking by and heard the discussion. He told the techs to replace the entire seat. Several day later Mobile Service came to my house and replaced the seat. The new one was exactly the same as the one I had, painful. SIGH!

So here’s the latest update on this financial scheme pretending to be a car company, which has seen an increasingly mounting fatality rate from false safety statements (as I have predicted here since at least 2016) and over a decade of obviously failed promises.

Tesla stands accused of aggressively posting bald faced lies about what is ahead; apparently a new variant of the insidious “advance fee fraud” (AFF).

Imagine getting a “419” email from a prince in Africa (Bazillionaire CEO Elon Musk is from South Africa) who not only falsely promises riches in exchange for a small investment, but that his greedy ruse will magically make driving safer (when in fact it makes it more dangerous).

The tech mogul took advantage of [baseless claims of future enrichment from] software update to increase the price of FSD, which now will cost $15,000 in North America, up 25% from $12,000 previously. […] To be sure, [Full Self Driving] does not make Tesla cars self-driving. […] The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating almost 40 crashes involving automated driving systems since 2016. Of those, more than 30 involved Teslas…

I’ve studied the “419” phenomenon for decades and often written about it here.

The mere fact software was negligently branded as “self-driving”, while being far from able to provide the basic requirements of self-driving, surely says it all for fraud investigators.

The “419” reference actually comes from the Nigerian criminal code. It is illegal to beg advance fees in a deceptive advertising campaign, a fraudulent scheme based on enrichment promises of buying into some bogus “appreciating assets” that will never come.

Any person who by any false pretence, and with intent to defraud, obtains from any other person anything capable of being stolen, or induces any other person to deliver to any person anything capable of being stolen, is guilty of a felony and is liable to imprisonment for three years.

It also is surely illegal to take your money into a system so unsafe that engaging with it makes your likelihood of death dramatically higher (loss of life, not just stolen money), but I don’t yet know the Nigerian criminal code for that.

In other words, just like with any Nigerian 419 scam, we see a Tesla CEO lie about an amazing return from advance fees yet deliver nothing even remotely close to what was promised. Tesla put its customers and everyone else in harms way as it caused more crashes, more fatalities, than it should… basically the company rushed poorly engineered updates and accelerated failures/devaluation all the while begging for money in advance based on false promises of safety.

If the Tesla car were an email message it obviously would be emotionally florid tales purporting to be from a wealthy African with too much money who makes very basic errors, yet somehow attracts intelligent and wealthy targets (which is exactly what Tesla has been as a company).

Primarily, she said, the victims have been well-educated westerners, such as such university professors, doctors, lawyers, financial planners and bankers.

Back in 2019 the world not only was falsely promised by Elon Musk that he would deliver self-driving by the end of that year but that he also would deliver the utopian robotaxi to roads by 2020.

Both were lies.

Again, I have to point out that the Tesla appeal for money in 2019 was tied directly to a CEO making fraudulent promises of personal enrichment.

A Tesla “semi” was promised by 2019, a “roadster” was promised to launch in 2020 and a “truck” was promised to launch in 2021.

People were begged to put advance payments down yet none of these vehicles launched. None. Instead “appreciation” for those advance fees saw only the depreciation of Tesla cars at a rate faster than the industry average.

This fundamentally is not just about a Ponzi like scheme, not just about taking all this money on false pretense, but again much more about untimely deaths of those who unfortunately fell victim to what seems to have hallmarks of a known life threatening fraud.

CA Firefighter Loses All Three Children in Tesla Crash. […] They were all killed at the scene when the vehicle swerved from the westbound lane of Highway 156 into the eastbound lane over solid double yellow lines, colliding with a tractor-trailer, the California Highway Patrol said. It’s unknown why the Tesla swerved into the lane with oncoming traffic, CHP said.

Unknown? I’d argue there already is plenty of research explaining how and why a Tesla is so unsafe, and moreover research why some people ignore all the warnings.

This paper discusses the linguistic pattern used by scammers, revealing language ideologies in question. It also demonstrates how linguistic anthropology can be applied to the challenge of developing linguistically and culturally adaptive controls for communication security.

R.I.P. Tesla owners. They don’t just lose money as if victims of Ponzi, they actually may be killed or see their whole family die in an elaborate Advance Fee Fraud.