The recent passing of a highly decorated U.S. Army Special Forces soldier highlights the urgent need for better mental health support for our service members, especially during challenging times like the holiday season. The Green Beret, who served his country with distinction, tragically died in a Tesla near the Las Vegas Strip following a difficult personal crisis.
Livelsberger enlisted in the Army in 2006 and served on active duty until 2011. He then had stints in the National Guard and Army Reserve before returning to active duty in December 2012 as a special operations soldier, the Army said. During his Army career, Livelsberger deployed twice to Afghanistan and served in Ukraine, Tajikistan, Georgia and Congo, the Army said. Among his awards: Five Bronze Stars, including one with a valor device for courage under fire; a combat infantry badge; and an Army Commendation Medal with valor. […] A law enforcement official said investigators learned through interviews that he may have gotten into a fight with his wife about relationship issues shortly before he rented the Tesla and bought the guns. …Livelsberger rented the Tesla electric vehicle in Denver on Saturday, and the sheriff displayed a map showing that it was charged in the Colorado town of Monument near Colorado Springs on Monday. On New Year’s Eve, it was charged in Trinidad, Colo., and the towns of Las Vegas, Albuquerque and Gallup in New Mexico, along the Interstate 40 corridor. Then on Wednesday, the day of the explosion, it was charged in the Arizona towns of Holbrook, Flagstaff and Kingman before video showed it on the Las Vegas Strip about 7:30 a.m.
As much as we should be talking about the more than 20 people in the last few months alone who died in a Tesla yet were almost completely ignored by this car company, their brash statements have been generating attention in this case for some of the most unfortunate reasons.
The incident has drawn attention not only for its circumstances but also due to deeply insensitive comments from Tesla’s South African-born CEO, who chose to publicly mock the highly decorated service member’s death rather than acknowledge the serious issues of mental health challenges facing our military community.
Such outrageously callous remarks about a soldier who dedicated his life to serving our country are particularly disturbing given the Tesla’s CEO’s recent history of anti-military anti-American rhetoric. Notably, it invokes an old pattern of 1980s South African pro-apartheid propaganda, where white supremacists framed U.S. special forces soldiers as stupid for supporting Black anti-Communist forces in neighboring countries.
Just days before this tragedy, while Livelsberger was on leave from his station in Germany, Musk published controversial statements in German media praising the return to an extremist political party – remarks that drew unprecedented criticism from German officials for aggressively endangering democratic institutions that U.S. military personnel are stationed there to protect.
The South African-born [white nationalist Musk] wrote… “Only the [new Nazi Party] can save Germany.” […] The editor of the centre-right newspaper’s opinion section, Eva Marie Kogel, posted… she had submitted her resignation in protest at the decision to run the article. Politicians from across the political spectrum criticised Musk’s attempts to put his thumb on the scales of German democracy, with the health minister, Karl Lauterbach, of Scholz’s Social Democratic party (SPD) calling his intervention “undignified and highly problematic” and Merz saying it was “intrusive and presumptuous”. Merz told the Funke media group: “I cannot recall in the history of western democracies a comparable case of interference in the election campaign of a friendly country.”
The American soldier’s final journey, which took him through multiple states during New Year’s Eve – a particularly challenging time for many dealing with mental health issues – serves as a sobering reminder of the importance of supporting those among us going through crisis.
This map of the long eight-stop route taken in a truck filled with highly flammable/explosive materials into the desert, illustrates importance of recognizing warning signs and the need for proactive support especially during leave and holidays. Source: Google Maps
Mental health emergencies deserve understanding and compassion, not ridicule. Livelsberger allegedly was carrying all his identification with him and left a note insisting his “stunt” “was not a terrorist attack”, which all was known to Tesla senior staff… making investigation of his suicide a quick and simple matter that demands proper respect and consideration.
Source: Stars and Stripes
This tragedy should serve as a call to action for better mental health resources and crisis intervention, especially for our veterans and active duty personnel.
Matthew Livelsberger: awarded five Bronze Stars, including one with a valor device for courage under fire, a combat infantry badge and an Army Commendation Medal with valor. Source: U.S. Army
While there continue to be very valid discussions to be had about the lack of vehicle safety in a Tesla, the focus now should remain on the loss of a valued member of our military community and the broader issue of mental health support for service members.
If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide, trained counselors are available 24/7 at 988, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Military service members and veterans have a Veterans Crisis Line by calling 988 then pressing 1, or texting 838255.
If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide, trained counselors are available 24/7 at 988, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Military service members and veterans have a Veterans Crisis Line by calling 988 then pressing 1, or texting 838255.
Executive Summary: The Tesla Cybertruck has been plagued with six recalls in just its first year due to design defects. Another one just may have been accidentally revealed in a massive explosion from fuel stored in the truck bed with cover closed. Unpainted flat steel body panels at sharp angles, combined with the dry and cold winter air, and the unsafe storage of metal fuel cans allowing vapor collection around fireworks, may have generated the kind of high charge static electricity tinder that made a sudden combustion inevitable.
High Risk Factors
This Cybertruck combination presents a highly elevated static electricity risk:
Low humidity (20% typical desert morning)
Cold temperatures (-5°C)
Large metallic surface area with sharp angles causing charge concentration points
Known defects in Cybertruck electrical grounding
High-speed long distance travel
Environmental Conditions
Air Temperature: -5°C (cold morning)
Relative Humidity: 20% (typical desert morning)
Vehicle Speed: 75 mph (33.528 m/s)
Distance: 1,300,000 m (Colorado Springs to Las Vegas)
Cross-sectional Area: 5.7 m²
Air Breakdown Field Strength: 3 × 10⁶ V/m (at sea level)
Material Properties
Steel Permittivity: 8.85 × 10⁻¹² F/m
Air Permittivity: 8.86 × 10⁻¹² F/m
Steel Resistivity: 6.9 × 10⁻⁷ Ω⋅m
Results
Charge Accumulation Rate: 1.20e-1 C/s Maximum Realistic Voltage: 3.00e+4 V Discharge Probability: 80.0% Charge Ratio (Cybertruck/Normal Truck): 1.67x
Risk Assessment
The Cybertruck’s angular metallic design creates 1.67x more charge accumulation than standard trucks
Voltage buildup is limited by air breakdown at 3.0 MV/m
Discharge probability is 80.0% under these conditions
Circumstances
It’s illegal to transport fireworks and gas cans together in a truck bed (or trunk, or inside a car). The victim was active duty military with knowledge in flammable/explosive material handling such as fuel cans so this doesn’t seem accidental.
The truck bed cover being closed means vapor likely accumulated for a while on a long drive, creating a dangerously combustible moment, also probably not accidental.
The Cybertruck has known electrical design flaws related to improper grounding and potential fire hazards, such as potential arcs when being shifted into park or during mechanical transitions. It is unlikely this was factored by the victim.
Metal fuel cans in a metal truck have been a known danger of sudden vapor combustion for many years, quickly destroying cars, begging the question whether Tesla ignored known safety practices.
…the Petroleum Equipment Institute, a trade group, found that there were at least 170 static electricity fires at gas stations from 1992 to 2006. …the problem probably isn’t a big one. Unless, of course, it’s your car that has burst into flames. Since Mrs. Shager’s pickup was destroyed in November, at least two other serious fires at gas stations have been attributed to static electricity, including one that severely burned a woman.
Some of this math may help explain the mystery surrounding 17 long seconds after the Cybertruck robotically parked itself neatly and quietly in front of the Trump Hotel (instead of crashing into the lobby) and began to emit smoke from the bed.
…military ID, passport and credit cards were found in the vehicle, along with several firearms, and that the driver had shot himself in the head before the vehicle detonated. “I’m comfortable calling it a suicide,” [Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Sheriff] McMahill said at the briefing. […] …gasoline canisters, camp fuel canisters and large firework mortars were found in the back of the vehicle after the explosion, which occurred about 15 seconds after the vehicle pulled in front of the building. It’s still unclear how the explosives were ignited, McMahill said.
If suicide of a US Army soldier with explosives expertise — self-immolation as protest — is officially suspected then a lot of the analysis shifts.
It’s possible firing a gun intentionally ignited the bed full of explosive fuel vapor. Or it’s possible the Cybertruck itself sparked in an electrical or mechanical event causing an ignition, after his suicide and unintentionally. There are many possibilities still, as details are being released, but static electricity risk might be considered another design defect of the Cybertruck worth investigating.
Nissan arguably created the modern American electric car market with its global EV sales leader the LEAF. While it was selling strong in modest numbers through 2019, it pioneered many of the EV features we take for granted today. What it didn’t do was lie. When it said range, it meant actual range.
Then Tesla came along late assembling an inexpensive kit car concept that went extremely heavy on future promises of luxury and very light on honesty, reliability or quality. They also allegedly played games with credit and loans to prop up earnings, while unabashedly and artificially doubling claimed battery range or corrupting the dashboard indicators. Their FSD turned out to be a scam, to boot, with almost nobody given a free trial agreeing to pay outrageous upcharge fees. Thus the over-cooked sales formulas hiding bad engineering were bound to crash eventually as the market of suckers dried up (or tragically was killed by fraud). So after a few years of sudden explosive (literally) sales that unfairly interfered with Nissan’s better vehicles, here we are.
Tesla sales declined even as overall sales of electric vehicles in the first 11 months of the year rose 25 percent globally, according to Rho Motion, a research firm.
The stark difference between Tesla EV sales numbers falling and all other brands leaping upward in 2024 has been truly remarkable to watch.
Chart: Michael Thomas. Source: CA New Dealers Association
There has been a dramatic increase in vehicle attacks on pedestrians after 2008 (from 16 over 35 years to 62 over 10 years), reflecting political promotion of their use as an offensive weapon for asymmetric urban conflict.When historians examine how societies normalize mechanized violence, the period between 2016 (Nice) and 2025 (New Orleans) will demand particular attention. This era marks a fundamental shift in how vehicular force evolved from terrorist tactic towards automated system of violence.
The Mineta Transportation Institute’s analysis of 78 vehicle ramming attacks between 1973-2018, for example, reveals a clear tactical progression foreshadowing the New Orleans tragedy.
The attacker drove around barricades and up onto the sidewalk of Bourbon Street, New Orleans Police Department Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said, avoiding barriers that had been placed by police. Kirkpatrick said the man “was trying to run over as many people as he could. We had a car there, we had barriers there, we had officers there, and he still got around.”
Vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs) represented the early apex, requiring extensive knowledge and complex logistics. Their sophistication proved their weakness – the 2010 Times Square bombing failed when the device malfunctioned, while in 2007, two separate VBIEDs in Britain failed to detonate, one even towed away for illegal parking before discovery.
Everything changed on Bastille Day, 2016, in Nice, France. The attack that killed 86 people stripped away complexity, requiring only a truck and a driver. This brutal simplification of attack echoes the natural pattern of mechanized violence evolution – wherever vulnerabilities are made more complex attackers tend to pivot towards opportunities of least resistance. The Nice attack marked one such tactical regression of deadly consequence, where an average of 3.6 fatalities per vehicle incident abruptly rose to 22.0 in crowded zones.
The American “car culture” response to the shift in attacks proved particularly telling. Within months of Nice, while counter-terrorism experts were still analyzing implications, seven U.S. states saw legislation introduced to grant legal immunity for driving into groups of people.
The language in these bills is remarkably similar from state to state, and in some cases, nearly identical.
North Dakota’s HB 1203 explicitly protected drivers “exercising reasonable care” when using their vehicles as weapons.
…the bill got introduced for people to be able to drive down the roads without fear of running into somebody and having to be liable for them.
Florida’s SB 1096 went even further with logic reversal, shifting burden of proof to American victims of terrorist attacks.
…the bill would have put the burden of proof on the injured person, not the driver, to prove that the driver’s actions were intended to cause injury or death.
The bills were written with cynical claims about protecting vulnerable drivers despite a reality of non-violent groups of unarmed people in the street. It was an obviously false victim construction with zero logical basis.
…existing laws already protect drivers who need to flee from a riot to defend themselves and their families. In both the criminal and civil contexts, self-defense laws provide justifications for a driver to use force to protect himself. A driver is further protected by either prosecutorial discretion in a criminal lawsuit or by comparative negligence law in a civil lawsuit. Because of these existing mechanisms, the statute is unnecessary to protect drivers from liability…
Thus, the new bills acted as a coordinated push to codify private vehicular force as state-sanctioned crowd control; the car as political power to undermine safety necessary for people to assemble or even move in public. The normalization of cars hitting people as an offensive action, as rooted in 1930s racist jaywalking laws and forced “side walks” (versus British word “pavement”), created a permissive atmosphere where boundaries between accident and attack, between self-defense and aggression, became deliberately blurred. Use of vehicles as an asymmetric weapon was surreptitiously promoted into common thought.
Media outlets played a crucial role in this normalization immediately following the horrifying Nice terror attack. Major platforms including Fox News and The Daily Caller published, then quietly deleted, articles in 2017 encouraging drivers to dehumanize and assault people as a form of political action.
Here’s a compilation of liberal protesters getting pushed out of the way by cars and trucks. Study the technique; it may prove useful in the next four years.
Social media likewise was filled with information warfare campaigns systematically promoting vehicular violence as white supremacist political action.
St. Paul police have placed a sergeant on leave as they investigate a report that he posted on Facebook, “Run them over,” in response to an article about an upcoming… protest. The comment detailed what people could do to avoid being charged with a crime if they struck someone [using their vehicle intentionally to cause harm].
While legislators and media normalized intentional vehicular violence, a parallel development was emerging from a notoriously racist car company: the automation of vehicle control systems. This shift would prove significant, as it removed even the psychological barriers that might give human attackers pause. Instead of requiring radicalization or intent, demonstrated within Minnesota police themselves, automated systems could now cause widespread harm through a programmatic indifference to (race-based) pedestrian safety.
A permissive framework would prove prophetic when autonomous systems began demonstrating systematic failures. Tesla’s Autopilot system has primarily revealed how automated control can inflict widespread damage globally without accountability. Between 2020-2024, over 900 “phantom braking” incidents and 273 documented crashes demonstrated how mechanical systems could exceed human actors in efficiency – a single software update affecting hundreds of thousands of vehicles simultaneously.
The contrast is stark:
New Orleans attack (2025): 15 deaths, massive response with claims of ISIS links
Waukesha parade (2021): 6 deaths, national crisis
Tesla Autopilot (2020-2024): 273+ documented crashes, treated as acceptable business risk
Monthly Tesla fatalities surpass historic terrorist vehicle ramming attacks
All Tesla Deaths Per Year. Source: TeslaDeaths.com
To put it another way, when three students in Oakland, California were killed by an electric fire in their Cybertruck, Tesla said nothing about the unexplained tragedy and the CEO was uncharacteristically silent even as regulators announced their investigation. However, when one person was then killed by a fire in their Cybertruck in front of the Trump hotel in Las Vegas, the Tesla CEO immediately promoted the concept of a truck firework and camping fuel fire being an unknown concept worthy of his entire senior team’s commitment to a full investigation.
Fireworks started an estimated 31,302 fires in 2022, including 3,504 structure fires, 887 vehicle fires…
And yet:
Likewise, within hours of the New Orleans attack, officials announced the discovery of an ISIS flag in the vehicle, prompting immediate calls for particularly targeted surveillance and control systems. This familiar pattern – using terrorism as justification for increased mechanization of particular control – obscures a crucial shift: while earlier attacks required human ideological motivation, automated systems can now inflict similar damage through simple errors or intentional manipulation. The flag, whether planted or authentic, serves primarily to maintain older narratives about vehicle violence while missing the much more pressing and broader systematic vulnerabilities (flags flown in Tesla factories).
The response to New Orleans illustrates this misdirection perfectly. While media is dragged by racist politicians into reporting a single flag in a single vehicle, twisting the narrative to serve their selfish nativist/xenophobic agenda, the more significant threat comes from concentrated private autonomous vehicle networks designed to exploit loopholes in urban safety. The same politicians who cited the ISIS flag as a cause for action simultaneously have discussed removing regulations and fast-tracking permits for Tesla to deploy even larger unrestricted fleets – effectively increasing the very vulnerability they claimed to be fighting. The cynical manipulation of terrorist narratives more fundamentally will be about control of emergent technology for urban warfare. As politicians stoke fears about individual attackers using one vehicle, they’re simultaneously enabling deployment of massive autonomous networks that weaponize thousands of vehicles via simple software changes. We’ve moved from isolated incidents requiring human intent to infrastructure-scale vulnerabilities that will be triggered remotely.
The Grünheide Tesla facility near Berlin exemplifies this blind spot in urban security. America has demonstrated how quickly societies normalize mechanized violence – first through social media campaigns promoting vehicle attacks, then through weak regulation of autonomous systems, and now through massive concentration of networked vehicles near population centers. Each step made the violence more efficient while reducing accountability. Export of these weapons systems to other countries is yet another predictable outcome.
When future historians analyze this progression, they’ll note how “dual-use capability concentrations” were hidden behind marketing promises of hands-free driving and cheap taxi rides. The evolution from Nice to New Orleans shows how vehicular violence became systematized – from complex terrorist operations to simple ramming attacks, then to legally-protected tactics, and finally to automated networks that could be weaponized through existing command infrastructure.
The critical question isn’t whether such systems will be deployed; they already exist in cities worldwide and are being quietly tested. Charlottesville saw a rare exception where a terrorist using the heavily-promoted “run them over” tactic was convicted of a hate crime. Would he have gotten away with it if he had used remote control instead and wasn’t in the car?
The question is whether we’ll recognize this pattern of weaponized vehicles for asymmetric attacks before the next wave of manufactured crises further normalizes urban population terrorism.
The racial bias in jaywalking enforcement (shown above) laid a groundwork for historically selective application of vehicle violence laws. Source: StreetsBlog
References:
Police Chief Magazine, “Low-Tech Terrorism: The Threat of Vehicles and Vehicle-Assisted Attacks,” International Association of Chiefs of Police.
