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.
Tesla’s poorly engineered power cells sitting on a trailer caught fire, closing a Tesla station. Source: PlugShareOne Tesla owner claims they didn’t expect failure on the busiest day, while another tries to warn “on fire!!!”
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.
Tesla “jealousy fire drill” management culture allegedly prefers workers lonely and desperate, even sleeping on the job, or they’re at risk of being fired for spending time with family (“disloyalty” to an attention sucking CEO).
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.
Tesla has tried to announce an “UNPAID PAID” Time Off (PTO) day to discourage workers from getting holiday time with their families.
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.
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.
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.
The Nissan LEAF is the EV everyone in Norway has been raving about.
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.
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.
