Security

Tesla Safety Crisis: Engineering Failures and Corporate Denial 2018-2024

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Tesla Fatal Accident Rate: 5.6 per billion miles
Industry Average: 2.8 per billion miles
Tesla’s fatality rate is double the industry average
Source: iSeeCars 2024 Safety Study
Year Fleet Size Growth Serious Incidents Fatal Incidents Key Patterns
2020 1x (baseline) 1x 1x Autopilot crashes into stationary objects
2021 1.5x 1.8x 1.6x Motorcycle collisions emerge as pattern
2022 2x 3x 2.6x First confirmed FSD-related fatality
2023 2.5x 4.2x 3.5x Multiple 4+ fatality crashes, door failures
2024* 3x 5x 4x 22+ deaths in Oct-Nov alone; immediate-ignition fires

* 2024 data through Q3 + verified Oct-Nov incidents. Source: NHTSA FARS database and verified incident reports

Critical Finding: While Tesla’s fleet size tripled from 2020-2024, serious incidents increased five-fold, suggesting systemic safety issues beyond simple scaling effects.

Executive Summary

In my decades of experience in safety engineering, I’ve witnessed vehicles evolve from death traps to marvels of information technology that save lives daily. However, Tesla’s trajectory defies a positive trend by signaling not progress but a dangerous regression while billing itself as a utopian investment (e.g. advance fee fraud). Between 2018 and 2024, Tesla’s vehicles displayed a disturbing pattern of harm from predictable engineering failures, resulting in death rates significantly exceeding industry norms. Immediate-ignition fires and inoperable electronic door systems are just the most visible symptoms today of a deeper systemic crisis, which Tesla has aggressively downplayed by shifting blame to drivers while avoiding accountability for design flaws.

The Evolution of a Crisis

2018-2020: Warning Signs Ignored

Tesla’s problems didn’t arise overnight. Early incidents hinted at recurring design flaws: crashes caused by Autopilot failures, misidentifications of hazards, and post-impact electronic malfunctions. Gao Yaning and Josh Brown, killed by their driverless algorithm, in 2016 were early harbingers. Yet, Tesla plowed ahead with expansion, using intentional disinformation campaigns of utopia to distract from dangerous warnings (like pointing to a shiny mirage in the desert while selling water bottles labeled “self filling”).

2021-2022: Trends Emerge

By 2021, the cracks became harder to ignore. Motorcycle-related fatalities highlighted Tesla’s known inability to detect objects including pedestrians and smaller vehicles. Sudden unintended acceleration (SUA) events and “veering” incidents grew far more common, joined by new horrors: crashes accompanied by instant fires and failed egress systems. Tesla’s vaunted safety ratings rang obviously hollow, as yet another intentional disinformation distraction from reality.

2023: A Critical Turning Point

Full Self-Driving (FSD) brought fresh risks and even more harms. Veering incidents tripled, and the first confirmed FSD fatality occurred in July (Pablo Teodoro III). By year-end, multiple-fatality events became disturbingly routine. A deadly fire in a Model Y trapped the occupants, reinforcing fears about Tesla’s reliance on poorly designed fragile electronics for life-critical systems. To be clear, at that time I called it out here:

Increasing Evidence Tesla Drivers Burn to Death While Unable to Open Any Door

2024: A Catastrophic Failure to Regulate

The final quarter of 2024 was catastrophic: October and November alone saw over 22 fatalities, including three separate incidents claiming 4+ lives each. Once again, intense post-crash fires and failed door systems emerged as defining factors of “death trap” by design, trapping victims and leaving first responders helpless.

Systemic Problems: Patterns Behind the Headlines

Uniquely Deadly Crash Fires

Tesla crashes frequently involve immediate, intense fires from design flaws, making occupant rescue nearly impossible. This contrasts with traditional vehicle fires (frequently electrical too), where a much more delayed ignition with multiple safeguards provides crucial rescue windows. Notably, none of the other EV models selling at or even above Tesla into the hundreds of thousands have reported the explosion of fire deaths.

Basic Door Design Failures

Tesla’s excessively complicated and sub-quality electronic doors often fail after impact, locking occupants into a complex puzzle while being burned alive as rescuers struggle in vain to access the cabin.

Widespread Failures Across Modes

Whether operating in manual mode, Autopilot, or FSD, the same failure patterns — veering, SUA, and crashes with severe fires — occur with disturbing regularity. Reflect back on an angry CEO telling the world there would be no safer car and anyone who disagreed should be ridiculed as a threat to safety.

Source: My 2021 presentation warning clearly how and why Tesla was a dangerous fraud and would accelerate unnecessary deaths by shooting messengers and undermining regulators.

Disproportionate Incident Growth

Tesla’s fleet tripled between 2020 and 2024, but severe incidents increased by five times. This isn’t a function of scale; it points to design flaws.

Statistical Evidence

  • Fatal Accident Rate: Tesla leads the industry at 5.6 deaths per billion miles (vs. 2.8 for all brands).
  • Dangerous Models: Both the Model Y and Model S rank among the 23 most dangerous cars despite their advanced technology.
  • Fleet Impact: Tesla’s fatality rate is five times higher than industry averages for comparable vehicles.

Corporate Denial: A Dangerous Culture

Tesla’s reaction to these failures reveals more about their priorities than any marketing campaign ever could. Instead of addressing the issues:

  • They tout crash test ratings while ignoring real-world outcomes.
  • They blame drivers, deflecting scrutiny from clear engineering flaws.
  • They attack critics, including NHTSA analyses, labeling concerns as “clickbait.”
  • They mislead with selective statistics, citing total miles driven while ignoring disproportionate per-mile fatality rates.

Recommendations for Action

  • Mandated Reporting: Regulators must require Tesla to report all incidents involving fires, door system failures, SUA, and veering. Transparency is the first step toward accountability.
  • Engineering Audits: Independent reviews of Tesla’s safety systems—particularly fire prevention, egress mechanisms, and electronic resilience—are overdue.
  • Consumer Protections: Tesla must provide clear warnings about the risks of their designs, alongside revised safety ratings based on real-world outcomes.

Conclusion: Beyond the 1950s Comparison

Tesla’s failures represent a regression not just to outdated safety standards, but to the reckless disregard of a pre-safety era. Their vehicles’ reliance on electronics for life-critical systems without adequate fail-safes has introduced modern hazards that didn’t exist even in the unsafe cars of the 1950s. Until Tesla confronts their self-inflicted systemic failures head-on, their alarming and unique fatality count will continue to climb, many preventable tragedies at a time.

The warning signs are glaring. The solutions are as obvious as ever.

It’s time for regulators to step in and call the fraud a fraud. Who can ensure Tesla’s promises of total fiction, which experts repeatedly warn it can never deliver, won’t continue to kill hundreds of innocent victims?

A safety engineer’s view of low quality in Tesla design could easily predict a rapid rise in fatalities. Source: IIHS

Tesla Deaths Per Year Accelerating Predictably

Source: TeslaDeaths.com
Source: Tesladeaths.com and NHTSA. The crash data clearly shows that both serious incidents (orange line) and fatal incidents (pink line) are increasing at a steeper rate than the fleet size growth (blue line). This is particularly evident from 2021 onwards, where: Fleet size (blue) shows a linear growth of about 1x per year. Serious incidents (orange) show an exponential growth curve, reaching nearly 5x by 2024. Fatal incidents (pink) also show a steeper-than-linear growth, though not as dramatic as serious incidents. The divergence between the blue line (fleet growth) and the incident lines (orange and pink) indicates that incidents are indeed accelerating faster than the production/deployment of new vehicles.
Security

PA Tesla Kills Two in “Veered” Crash Into Another Tesla

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A Tesla crashed into another Tesla, exploding into a chemical fire so intense that emergency responders were unable to prevent two deaths.

An elderly couple has been identified as the victims of a fiery crash involving two Teslas on Nov. 15. Bedminster police said a Tesla being driven on Easton Road in Bedminster struck another that was parked and unoccupied causing a fire around 11:15 a.m. Both the passenger and driver were pronounced dead at the scene.

Energy, Security

From Gold to Grid: Russia’s Foreign Infrastructure Control Playbook

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Russia’s lone veto of a Sudan ceasefire (1-14 UN vote) last week follows a pattern of infrastructure manipulation — one that provides a warning about cryptocurrency’s growing control over American power grids. In Sudan, Russia profits from gold market chaos while blocking peace. In America, crypto operations fight oversight while gaining unprecedented control of power infrastructure. The parallel is clear: using critical infrastructure for political leverage while building shadow financial networks.

From Gold to Grid

Russia’s strategy in Sudan is brutally effective: maintain political chaos to control resource extraction while cynically preaching “sovereignty.” By arming both the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in their civil war, Russia secures gold extraction and port access while creating untraceable channels for moving money outside Western oversight. Over 10 million displaced civilians, and research from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine estimating more than 26,000 violent deaths in Khartoum alone between April 2023 and June 2024, show the spiraling human cost of this cruel profit scheme.

Now cryptocurrency’s evolution in America follows the same deadly playbook of undermining safety for profit:

Phase 1: Infrastructure Control

Phase 2: Shadow Financial Networks

Phase 3: Political Capture

  • Moving from obstruction to active elimination of oversight
  • Using infrastructure control as political leverage
  • Funding campaigns to dismantle regulatory frameworks

Putin’s Playbook in Action

In Sudan, Russia’s approach exposes their strategy: claim to fight “colonialism” while actually colonizing through chaos. They maintain puppet influence while stirring violence, creating opportunities to undermine local authority through:

  • Resource extraction (gold mines, ports)
  • Secret trade networks (sanctions evasion)
  • Diplomatic leverage (UN veto power)
  • Infrastructure control (both military and economic)

The cryptocurrency industry follows this same pattern domestically. While claiming to fight for “financial freedom,” they’re actually building concentrated control over critical infrastructure. In Texas alone, their 41 GW of mining requests represents unprecedented leverage over the power grid – especially concerning given crypto industry’s millions in political donations to state officials overseeing grid policy.

National Security Implications

Energy Secretary Granholm has expressed that projected 15% increases in electricity demand by 2050 “literally” keep her up at night. But the immediate threat isn’t just about capacity — it’s about control and who profits from chaos.

The industry’s progression from resisting oversight to actively funding its elimination mirrors Russia’s approach: create crisis, build parallel financial networks, and convert infrastructure control into political power.

Infrastructure as Political Weapon

Like Russia’s exploitation of Sudan’s gold, cryptocurrency operations are transforming American infrastructure into a political weapon. Their concentrated control in vulnerable grid areas combined with active resistance to transparency creates both direct infrastructure leverage and political influence. The goal isn’t profit — it’s power.

The EIA’s estimate of 0.6-2.3% of U.S. electricity consumption deliberately understates their true leverage, given their strategic positioning and successful obstruction of data collection. Like Russia hiding gold trades, crypto hides its true footprint.

Warning Signals

When Russia vetoes peace in Sudan while profiting directly from gun violence and limited government, they expose how infrastructure capture really works. Create chaos, promise freedom, seize control. The cryptocurrency industry uses identical tactics especially in Texas: fight “government overreach” while building unprecedented private control over American infrastructure.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. Just as Russia’s “anti-colonial” rhetoric in Sudan masks deadly exploitation, cryptocurrency’s “financial freedom” claims hide a systematic effort for unaccountable elites to seize America’s critical infrastructure. Sudan today shows us America’s tomorrow if we continue allowing private interests following an authoritarian playbook to drive the political narratives.

Sources:
EIA Today in Energy
Utility Dive Report
Reuters on Russia’s Restrictions
The Heatmap

Food, Security

U.S. Food So Weakly Regulated That 99% of New Chemicals Added Since 2000 Avoided Safety Tests

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Unsurprising to me how the lessons from The Jungle have been completely forgotten in America.

Who remembers The Jungle at all? It was such bad exposure for industrial misconduct (e.g. grinding up rodents and even workers into the sausage making machines) that it led to the establishment of American food and drug administration (FDA). Or so the story goes…

A tragic example of how this system can go wrong occurred two years ago, when nearly 400 people got sick after eating a ground beef substitute – called French Leek and Lentil Crumbles – sold by Daily Harvest, the popular food subscription service. More than 130 of the people who got sick were hospitalized with gastrointestinal distress, liver injuries and other symptoms, and at least 39 people had to have their gallbladders removed.

Investigators determined that the most likely cause of the sickness was a new ingredient in the crumbles called tara flour – a high-protein flour made from the seeds of a tree grown in South America. Even though there were no published toxicological studies of tara flour and the FDA had not evaluated its safety, a company that imported tara flour from Peru had claimed that it was [exempt from regulations] and supplied the ingredient to distributors in the United States.

Loopholes in American food regulation are now so big it’s hard to find examples of things that are being tested for safety.

An analysis published in 2022 by the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization, found that 98.7 percent of the roughly 766 new food chemicals introduced to the food supply since 2000 were not approved by the FDA.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the FDA acknowledged that under federal law, food companies do not have to get premarket approval from the agency to use ingredients in their products…

No approval necessary? Well then, no wonder people are getting sick.

Scientists at the Cleveland Clinic have found that consuming xylitol and erythritol increases the risk of cardiovascular events such as heart attacks and strokes. Their studies indicate that these low-calorie sweeteners promote the formation of blood clots.

Who will write the book on xylitol?