California Gov Drops Hammer on DMV Driverless Failures (Tesla)

The Tesla Semi has been a complete disaster, like all their engineering.

From abruptly stopping to being impossible to drive, to crashing into other semis… with only a dozen made so far it’s been ugly.

Now the California government is stepping in and calling out their own DMV.

State lawmakers argue that the state Department of Motor Vehicles has so badly mishandled the driverless car industry that it can’t be trusted to oversee big rigs barreling down the highways autonomously.

They’re not wrong. Thus AB316 is wise and necessary.

It’s one thing for millions of Tesla cars controlled centrally by faulty software to be a threat to national security, like a bunch of missiles. Semis (as seen recently in a certain Ukrainian bridge explosion) raise the threat from the coin-operated extremists running Tesla to an entirely new level.

Allegedly a naive 20-something Stanford kid with zero supply-chain safety expertise thrown into a steaming pile of parts meant to “transform” the future is in way over his head in his first job. The Tesla Semi basically has been exposed as little more than a dorm room joke, a meme at best, for some dudes high on having more money than common sense.

When even the DMV is getting hammered like this, you know here’s no amount of lipstick that can cover the latest Tesla pig.

Now is a good time to remember when Uber was told by San Francisco regulators to slow down. The obviously immoral ride service (running red lights) instead gleefully raced into Arizona’s open arms. They crashed soon after and then their software killed a woman. The result of that 2018 murder was Uber cancelled the engineering.

Tesla software at the same time as Uber in 2018 also killed a pedestrian. However, very unlike Uber, Tesla pumped the market to pay a higher premium for terminally flawed code and then used it to kill over 30 more people (so far), not to mention assets destroyed and damaged.

The whole Semi project was thus born out of gross negligence in Tesla engineering management that likely will cause mass suffering. California should be prepared to shut it all down.

Let’s see if Arizona shows up again now waving open arms to attract another predictable disaster.

“If you really need a car, buy an old one and use it as little as possible”

Rowan Atkinson has some brilliant things to say about why nobody should be in a rush to buy an electric car.

In terms of manufacture, [modern ICE] cars have paid their environmental dues and, although it is sensible to reduce our reliance on them, it would seem right to look carefully at ways of retaining them while lowering their polluting effect. Fairly obviously, we could use them less.

Old cars haven’t actually paid their dues. In fact, their dues go up with use.

Source: EPA

I get what he’s saying though. Cars now end up lasting decades, almost like bicycles.

His bottom line is that he wants electric car purchases to come as a reasonable transition… instead of a rushed environmental disaster due to a “fashion” craze among attention-seeking buyers who crash and burn without care.

Gradual, thoughtful systemic changes made instead of rushed snakeoil? Seems logical.

Tesla ideas have been unquestionably bad for the environment, rather uniquely among electric vehicles. I’d say they are a joke, but Rowan Atkinson is the expert on that subject.

Poor quality engineering is why junkyards now see hundreds showing up in the first 10,000 miles.

It’s become the bell-bottom pants of cars, but more importantly perhaps the sweat-shop-made highly flammable toxic polyester pair that already have killed dozens.

In other words, if Tesla were a clothing company, they would be out of fashion far too quickly yet probably deemed illegal not fast enough.

Speaking of which, I’ve noticed 1,000s of used Tesla flooding the market in San Diego, California. Apparently people there are realizing the immediate death trap risk, if not other long term catastrophic design and service failures. Should they be allowed to resell?

Slow Chargers Save Time

Interesting thoughts by someone realizing their whole life improved when they quit orienting their life around gasoline.

Every side of the EV industry is focused on fast charging, and making it faster. It should be—on a road trip or otherwise needing to minimize downtime, it’s crucial to plug in somewhere that can charge as rapidly as the Ioniq 5 allows. But the odd thing about fast chargers is that they can inflict wasted time. A roughly half-hour session adding 200-plus miles of range is impressive, but that’s a period I need to stay in or near the Ioniq 5, lest I incur idle fees or the ire of another EV driver. But it’s also not necessarily enough time to get anything meaningful done.

In certain situations, so-called “slow” Level 2 chargers provide more flexibility, as I’ve found with the Flo network’s 7-kW charger, located two blocks from my apartment. I must retract my earlier cruel descriptors of it: “too slow to be worthwhile” and a “worst case scenario.” It’s proven to be neither.

Driving home late one evening, I found myself on the brink: With the Ioniq 5’s battery at just 4 percent, I’d left barely enough to reach a fast charger the next day—if it would be enough at all. But that neighborhood plug sat unoccupied, so I decided to see what it could do for me overnight. Turns out, a lot. Getting to 80 percent took nearly 10 hours, but it was all time I spent asleep and getting work done at home the next morning. That is, exactly what I’d do regardless.

Another useful instance occurred on a Saturday afternoon, when there was nothing on my schedule but chores and a bike ride. With the Ioniq 5’s battery at 45 percent I didn’t strictly need to charge, but with the Flo charger free, I figured I might as well. My activities took slightly more than 5 hours, enough time for the battery to reach 90 percent.

Of course they were driving an electric car brand other than a Tesla, otherwise the story would simply be about them being burned to death.