The news points out that the owners had an extra large driveway where they parked two infamously “brightly lit” Tesla cars far away from their home.

Two Teslas were involved in a fire that spread to nearby vegetation at a Lafayette residence, the Contra Costa County Fire Protection District (Con Fire) said. The fire happened Tuesday morning at 198 Hunsaker Canyon Road. The fire started in the home’s driveway where two Teslas parked next to each other. […] The driveway is large enough and far enough from the home to where the house was not threatened by the fire. Platt said no structures were threatened due to the fire. However, the two vehicles were destroyed by the fire…

With plummeting value of these vehicles, as Californians wisely say they never will be fooled again by Elon Musk fraud, it kind of begs a new question… are Tesla owners storing them in remote spots and hoping these cars burn up for insurance money?

Tesla sales in California dropped 24.1 % in the second quarter, the brand’s third straight quarterly decline in the state. Purchases dipped 7.8% in the first quarter of 2024 and 9.8% in the final quarter of last year. Year-to-date, Tesla sales in California are down 17% compared to last year, according to the latest analysis of new vehicle registrations published by the California New Car Dealers Association (CNCDA). Instead of a Tesla from Musk’s $793 billion electric vehicle empire, California car buyers are purchasing battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) from Toyota, Hyundai, and Ford. The analysis found Toyota BEV registrations have soared 108.1% so far this year, while Hyundai and Ford BEV registrations rose 65.7% and 26.4%, respectively.

As Toyota’s battery electric vehicle (BEV) sales surge by nearly 110%, Tesla’s valuation craters across the country into toxic fire pits, exposing the perils of hype over substance in the automotive industry.

It’s worth calling out that Toyota’s pioneering eBox BEV, powered by AC Propulsion engines, stands as a testament to responsible engineering in 2006 — a path that was shamefully bullied out of the market by false representations when Tesla co-opted the technology in the 2010s without due credit or care.

A three-quarter’s long market correction away from the fraud of Tesla and back towards Nissan and Toyota’s time-tested manufacturing excellence is long overdue.

It should go without saying that the Japanese manufacturing standards, rooted in post-WWII reforms under American occupation, were designed to prevent the very corporate malpractices and ill-gotten profits by Elon Musk that he’s now trying to use to overthrow American democracy. Without fraud, there would be no Tesla.

We can blame a lax regulatory environment in the U.S. market for dangerous replays of multiple past corporate scandals.

Have we learned nothing from Texas-based Enron, familiar to everyone… or even the Texas-based Dell?

Computer historians may note how Tesla’s trajectory eerily mirrors past technological debacles in electrical engineering such as Dell’s concealed 97% failure rate, and an underlying capacitor plague story.

A scientist steals a secret formula for an electrical product from his Japanese employer and takes it to China. Then it is stolen again and turns up in Taiwan. But something goes wrong – and thousands, perhaps millions, of computers and electrical goods in the West begin to burn out or explode. It sounds like the plot of a thriller, but it’s reality.

The fact that Tesla could inject intentional and egregious lies into the BEV market to unseat Nissan, let alone Toyota, underscores a disturbing pattern of corporate negligence and consumer endangerment in America.

For example Tesla very strategically lied about battery range to shock the market with false superiority and displace the global-sales leader BEV Nissan LEAF; engineers were directed to pollute dashboard numbers to dangerously defraud owners while sending reports and complaints into black hole. Does anyone really believe the market could correct this on its own? We mainly see settlements to hush victims, not to mention class-action lawsuits blocked by heavy “fine print” tactics that obviously were setup by Tesla’s predator CEO to shame and blame his unwitting victims.

Austin-based Tesla today is emerging as the Austin-based Dell of yesterday, repeating a tragic capacitor plague disaster with near total failure rates in vehicles that “burn out or explode”.

The electric vehicle industry demands innovation rooted in safety, sustainability, and ethical practices. It’s time we hold egregious tech frauds accountable and return to baseline principles of responsible engineering that once defined American innovation by embracing industry regulation… as found in a rapid rise in vehicle quality and performance from American occupied Japan (and Germany).