1) The witness and barely-surviving passenger in a Tesla very clearly stated (based on 911 dispatch recordings and interviews) that the owner had FSD controlling the car when it crashed and killed him.

Rossiter, who survived the crash, told emergency responders that von Ohain was using an “auto-drive feature on the Tesla” that “just ran straight off the road”…

2) The same witness said FSD had been in use on the trip just before the fatal crash, and noted that it had been repeatedly making unsafe movements requiring quick interventions.

3) The dead owner’s widow also stated the victim was convinced as an employee of Elon Musk that FSD should be trusted all the time and every time the car was operated… for safety.

Von Ohain used Full Self-Driving nearly every time he got behind the wheel, Bass said, placing him among legions of Tesla boosters heeding Musk’s call to generate data and build the technology’s mastery. While Bass refused to use the feature herself — she said its unpredictability stressed her out — her husband was so confident in all it promised that he even used it with their baby in the car. […] “Now it feels like we were just guinea pigs.”

[…] “Once Hans passed away and time went by, there wasn’t any more discussion about him,” said the former employee, a member of von Ohain’s team who soon resigned. To von Ohain’s widow, Tesla’s silence seemed almost cruel. Though the company eventually helped cover the cost of her move back home to Ohio, Bass said, Tesla’s first communication with the family after the crash was a termination notice she found in her husband’s email.

These three points come through clearly in a new Washington Post article about the late Hans von Ohain, a former Tesla employee.

Tesla owners have long complained of occasionally erratic behavior by the cars’ software, including sudden braking, missed road markings and crashes with parked emergency vehicles. Since federal regulators began requiring automakers to report crashes involving driver-assistance systems in 2021, they have logged more than 900 in Teslas. A Post analysis found at least 40 crashes that resulted in serious or fatal injuries.

[…]

As Rossiter yelled for help on the deserted mountain road, he remembers, his friend was screaming inside the burning car.

Allegedly the Tesla Model 3 FSD software “veered” off a Colorado road straight into a tree without braking. Although von Ohain survived the crash, emergency responders and his friend watched him trapped and burned alive, typical for Tesla crashes.

Check out Tesladeaths.com if you want to track the rapidly mounting Tesla death toll.

And watch this.

SF crowds celebrating Lunar New Year brought the spirit of “Burning Man” back to its streets (where the event started), by using fireworks to publicly destroy a Waymo.

Reports are full of shock and awe.

When I arrived on scene, SFFD was already on scene hosing down the car with water and their chemical extinguishers. The battery appeared to be reigniting multiple times and was smoking like crazy. The live footage…gives a decent idea to how I came on to scene, which was after the attack on the vehicle. The vehicle looked completely “decapitated” and I have never seen a vehicle that damaged up close.

Obviously if more people attended “Burning Man” they would have been suitably prepared and treated this as a more accessible venue, maybe even assumed it was Waymo sponsoring Lunar New Year celebrations.

Publicly donating one of its robots to be destroyed? Can you imagine?

Unfortunately, the sacrifice reads more like San Francisco being like good old San Francisco, and suffering from targeted agitators who really like to blow up a parade.

I mean if you’re foreign military intelligence and you want to know more about the safety of road robots, your troops have been on the ground for years in San Francisco. I certainly run into them, and have seen their work, so it’s curious how they don’t get reported more often for dangerous meddling and experimenting with robots and public safety.

To be clear, putting your life in the hands of a road robot is like throwing away your freedom. You think a company like Waymo is ready and able to fight for your safety, disposable customer? Think again. Riders describe being helpless and terrified.

If we were outside walking we could’ve walked away, run away. If we were driving, we could make sure we locked the door. In this instance, we literally had no control.

Waymo. No control.

In related news, three days ago a Waymo drove into a cyclist.

A cyclist was injured in a collision with a Waymo driverless vehicle in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood on Tuesday afternoon, police said. …”our vehicle applied heavy braking but was not able to avoid the collision”…

Waymo. Not able to avoid the collision.

A big crash, similar to many other sudden “veered” Tesla, has reportedly just burned a young man to death in University City.

The man was driving a 2021 Tesla Model 3 on Genesee Avenue near Centurian Square, near University City High School, shortly after 4:20 a.m. when he made an unsafe move and hit a right side curb, said police Officer Sarah Foster. The car continued forward and slammed into a light pole.

Other reports say the light pole was at 6900 Genesee, and I see there are very few poles to hit, so I’m guessing about here on the map.

Notably, I can think of FOUR recent sudden unexplained “veered” Tesla crashes on California roads that looked exactly like this. Center divided four lanes with intermittent trees. FOUR sudden “veered” FATAL crashes. This is not normal. Tesla is not safe.

Update: Construction

Lanes will be shifted on Genesee Avenue to allow for two-way traffic; pipeline installation will occur in the southbound lanes and there will be one lane in each direction in the northbound lanes of Genesee Avenue.

A significant win for data integrity.

Michael Mann, among the world’s most renowned climate scientists, won a defamation case in D.C. Superior Court against two conservative writers.

Mann, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, had sued Rand Simberg, a policy analyst, and Mark Steyn, a right-wing author, for online posts published over a decade ago, respectively, by the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the National Review.

…jury ordered Simberg to pay Mann $1,000 in punitive damages; it ordered Steyn to pay $1 million in punitive damages.