We know Tesla intentionally engineered its software to treat stop signs as optional. One man says he is willing to stand up and make a change. There should be many more of these:
A lawsuit filed last week by a Portland-area man claims a Tesla in self-driving mode blew through a stop sign in Clackamas County and T-boned his car — in one of the first-of-its kind lawsuits in Oregon alleging life-endangering flaws with Tesla’s automated technology. Michael Ward’s lawsuit states that he suffered fractures to his face, teeth and spine when Ngoc Phuong Anh Dinh’s Tesla crashed into the passenger side of his car at the intersection of Oregon 212 with Southeast Sunnyside Road.
The question really is whether a CEO can be held accountable for the company’s flagrant disregard for public safety.
No, really, Tesla intentionally engineered their cars to treat stop signs as optional.
Tesla, Inc. has agreed to recall 53,822 2016-2022 vehicles equipped with the Full Self-Driving (Beta) (FSD) feature which might allow the vehicles to roll through an intersection without stopping for a STOP sign. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Part 573 Safety Recall Report 22V-037…
Room 641A’s real legacy isn’t about technical infrastructure or corporate jurisdiction — it’s about how easily critical knowledge gets buried. The old Wired documentation of the 2006 case seems to have disappeared.
Former AT&T technician Mark Klein is the key witness in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s class-action lawsuit against the telecommunications company, which alleges that AT&T cooperated in an illegal National Security Agency domestic surveillance program. AT&T whistle-blower Mark Klein says this secret room in an AT&T switching center is home to data-mining equipment that can spy on internet communications. Mark Klein
Former AT&T technician Mark Klein is the key witness in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s class-action lawsuit against the telecommunications company, which alleges that AT&T cooperated in an illegal National Security Agency domestic surveillance program.
Klein’s evidence is a collection of sensitive documents he retained when he retired from AT&T. Those documents are now filed under court seal, but Wired News independently acquired and published a significant portion of them in May, 2006. Those excerpts follow.
Study Group 3, LGX/Splitter Wiring, San Francisco
This four-page excerpt is from a 60-page document a management technician “left lying around on top of a router,” says Klein. It describes AT&T’s efforts to install splitters on internet fiber optic cables at the company’s San Francisco internet hub. Page 2 describes the splitter and lists the equipment at the receiving end of the tapped lines. Page 3 is a diagram depicting the tap, and page 4 details some of connections between the splitter cabinet and what Klein calls a “secret room” housing the equipment.
0_2
1_2
2_3
3_2
SIMS, Splitter Cut-In and Test Procedure
A departing AT&T technician gave this 44-page document to Klein as he cleaned out his desk. These two pages, excerpted by Klein, show AT&T re-rerouting its high speed data circuits through the splitter cabinet that performs the physics of the alleged wiretaps. The work was apparently overseen by AT&T’s Network Operations Center in Bridgeton, Missouri. “SIMS” is an unexplained reference to the secret room, according to Klein.
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Cut-In and Test Procedure
These two pages, excerpted by Klein from another “Cut-In and Test Procedure” document, further illustrate AT&T re-rerouting its high speed data circuits for the surveillance, according to Klein. Page 1 diagrams the new connection through the splitter cabinet, and page two shows AT&T phasing in the fiber optic splitters on its high-speed links to other ISPs, including ConXion, Verio, XO, Genuity, Qwest, PAIX, Allegiance, Abovenet, Global Crossing, C&W, UUNET, Level 3, Sprint, Telia, PSINet, and the Mae West interconnect.
Many people later described the program as a Bush administration implementation of mass surveillance. Here’s the POGO recap:
…despite the fact that intelligence failures related to 9/11 were primarily based not on a lack of data points but on an inability to connect the dots, the Bush administration launched an effort to collect dots on an unprecedented scale. The President’s Surveillance Program, known by the code name Stellar Wind, undertook three audacious aims: First, to collect the content of international communications on a mass scale. Second, to collect telephony communications records (who you call, when, and for how long) on a nationwide scale. And third, to collect internet metadata, also on a bulk scale. These systems were built on nationwide dragnet orders demanding companies continuously supply private information not on suspects, but rather from all individuals across the United States.
According to another Wired article (also with dead links to the source material), Klein cited the Bush administration in his decision to reveal the secret rooms.
Klein said he came forward because he does not believe that the Bush administration is being truthful about the extent of its extrajudicial monitoring of Americans’ communications. “Despite what we are hearing, and considering the public track record of this administration, I simply do not believe their claims that the NSA’s spying program is really limited to foreign communications or is otherwise consistent with the NSA’s charter or with FISA,” Klein’s wrote. “And unlike the controversy over targeted wiretaps of individuals’ phone calls, this potential spying appears to be applied wholesale to all sorts of internet communications of countless citizens.”
One of the nice things about Klein (arguably giving him legit whistleblower credibility) is how he wanted the right people to know what was going on, but he himself didn’t want to be known.
Klein has not spoken publicly since May, 2006 when he spoke on the courthouse steps in San Francisco. […] They are vacumming everything going across those links, I’m certain of it. That’s the physical arrangement; there’s no dispute about it, I looked at the cables, I traced the cables. I know where they went. The documents show where they went; they go to the secret room. I was watching [President Bush’s December 2005 press conference about the wiretapping program] and I was getting angrier and angrier — so most people hearing that would think ‘I don’t make calls to Al Qaeda so that doesn’t affect me.’ That’s what they wanted you to think. They tried to make you think it was about phone calls, but a lot of it is also about the internet and about gobs and gobs of information going across the internet and that affects everybody. And that’s the part they haven’t let out, and that’s the part I decided had to be uncovered.
The NSA’s domestic spying program thus wasn’t uncovered by leaked classified documents but by technical blueprints “left lying around on top of a router” for regular staff to see. Surveillance’s vulnerability lies in a dependence on oath and obedience, calling upon ordinary technicians with access to physical infrastructure to maintain loyalty beyond the pale.
And now two decades later these documents have largely vanished, much like the technicians reading them. What remains are secondhand summaries, dead links, and sealed court records. The erosion of technical evidence leaves a new era of protocol designers with incomplete knowledge, making future systems susceptible to repeating past vulnerabilities.
The Bluesky protocol, despite being a modern, decentralized platform, reflects some of these same risks. Bluesky’s heavy reliance on centralized Relay and indexing services echoes the architectural flaws that made Room 641A possible:
Relays act as central aggregation points where all user data must flow.
App Views maintain centralized indexes, which require comprehensive network visibility.
Federation is only implemented at the application layer, while network traffic flows remain concentrated.
Unlike fully peer-to-peer systems, this design creates predictable chokepoints vulnerable to Room 641A-style interception. While software inherently depends on hardware, Bluesky’s architecture amplifies surveillance risks by consolidating traffic through critical points.
Until we integrate the lessons from seasoned experts and whistleblowers like Klein into system design, we’ll continue building flawed platforms while convincing ourselves that they are entirely new.
Even more forgotten? Terry Childs, a network administrator for the city of San Francisco, was arrested in 2008 for refusing to hand over administrative passwords to the city’s FiberWAN system, effectively locking the city out of its own network. While these actions sparked significant controversy, there was never enough public exposure or reporting about how he had pulled a “641A” — engaged in tapping the data center (drilled holes into a wall and split fiber from the backbone into a reinforced cabinet with encrypted servers).
…Hugging Face released a dataset composed of one million Bluesky posts, complete with when they were posted and who posted them, intended for machine learning research.
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
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.comSource: 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.
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.
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