You may recall that the invention of the car license plate was to help stop hit and run crimes against cyclists (and pedestrians).

A prominently displayed number on a plate was supposed to help increase chances of criminal prosecution, making roads safer.

Fast forward to today and the license plate gets reported as useless while cars are targeting bicyclists in hit and run attacks known as “dooring”.

Here’s a perfect example from 2022. Everything is caught on video by the bicyclist, and yet…

Walker contacted the police as soon as he got home, who were unable to determine the owner of the vehicle that “doored” him. Walker said the police told him they suspect the license plates were cloned. (License plate cloning is the illegal act of “displaying someone else’s registration number on a vehicle to hide its true identity.”)

What is dooring? It’s an insidious crime, described here from the victim perspective.

…it was a deliberate hit and not someone misjudging a close pass,” Walker told Bicycling. Footage from the rearview camera he keeps mounted on his bike revealed two cars coming up from behind him on the road. The backdoor on the second car opened as it approached Walker and made hard contact with him.

A passenger in a car uses the door, opening it suddenly like a battering weapon from behind, to inflict physical harm on cyclists.

It’s not isolated, or a case of one interaction, and more like an organized antisocial trend especially among those who set out with a hit and run mentally.

That means whether a passenger is in an Uber, or in a stolen car with bogus plates, the car door is increasingly used as a weapon with far too little accountability.

At least 200 similar dooring cases, in which a car door opening at the wrong time injures a cyclist, have been reported in the past five years, based on data from TransBASE. The total number is likely higher, as the data only includes incidents reported to the police. […] “The biggest problem we see is actually about Uber,” said Michael Stephenson, the founding attorney of Bay Area Bicycle Law. “A lot of cyclists who are calling us are getting doored by passengers.”

Another video has just been released that details how cars carefully target cyclists, and swing the door as a weapon.

These assaults appear to be happening to multiple cyclists over the course of several days, suggesting they are not isolated attacks. At least 14 cyclists have been targeted and eight have been hit…. “Some of the people said that they were being intentionally rammed from behind to be knocked over,” Charlotte Hryse, a volunteer with East Bay Bike Party said in an interview with ABC7 News. One of the perpetrators was caught on video by a local cyclist. In the incident caught on the riders bike cam, the vehicle is seen moving at driving speed when the driver swerves up next to a cyclist riding in a bike lane. The passenger in the vehicle then flings the passenger side door open in an attempt to hit the cyclist.

And here’s the real kicker to the story, which brings us back to the point about identity and investigations in hit and run attacks.

East Bay Bike Party stated they believe three separate and possibly stolen cars are being used in these attacks. The vehicles are being described as Hyundais or Kias.

The Hyundais or Kias are so notorious for being easy to steal, insurance companies have been refusing to cover them.

The big question looming in cities will become why are they enabling such brazen crimes with cars, terrorism even, instead of investing in safe cycling infrastructure. It costs a city far less to protect the cyclists than ignore an explosion in car crimes.

Tesla are basically unsafe to have on roads. This is no longer even worth debating, as another firetruck has been seriously damaged and taken out of service by a Kamikaze.

One person is dead after slamming a Tesla into a fire truck Saturday morning, officials say. The accident happened along I-680 at Treat Boulevard near Walnut Creek just before 4 a.m. Fire officials say the truck was struck in the rear by the Tesla Model S…

At least Chinese balloons are highly visible from a distance and moving slowly, allowing for a considered response. These Tesla attacks on America come in like a ballistic missile targeting first responders.

And if the notoriously suicidal Tesla doesn’t injure first responders directly, its design failures still will seriously distract/disable their abilities to respond to other real emergencies.

Authorities said the truck was badly damaged and will be out of service for an extended period.

Tesla causing massively wasteful fires is bad enough, disabling hugely expensive taxpayer fire trucks in California is next level evil.

And to be clear, that truck was doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing.

…the fire engine “was stopped at the rear of the scene to protect personnel and assist in diverting traffic.”

Diverting normal traffic, sure. Also poviding a defensive perimeter against Tesla Kamikaze attacks. Is Tesla paying that cost?

Four fire fighters directly targeted in the Tesla path of attack were fortunately not killed.

Given the early morning time of the accident, and the freeway location, there’s a very high probability the driver was asleep and relying entirely on the fraud of Tesla’s FSD.

Perhaps more to the point, the bright white seats (warning: covered in blood) were in a very reclined position.

Tesla “driverless” software has a long and tragic history of slamming into highly visible large trucks and emergency vehicles, terminating its sleeping driver. Remember the January 2016 news?

…Elon Musk said the firm was in the process of making improvements to its auto pilot system aimed at dramatically reducing the number of crashes blighting the model S.

Promises, processes.

Here’s what that CEO’s 2016 prediction about “dramatically reducing” crashes has meant in reality: a massive increase in deaths.

Tesla Death Toll as of 2/18/2023: 356 (Autopilot: 19)

For the record, once again, that rediculously underreported January 2016 autopilot fatality was Tesla driving straight into the back of a service vehicle despite bright lights flashing.

So here we are in 2023… wondering why Tesla hasn’t been grounded?

These horrific crashes obviously don’t blight the fraud of Tesla nearly enough because people keep signing up and paying far too much money just to kill themselves at great taxpayer expense.

The news today is yet again truly tragic, and totally avoidable (ban Tesla).

A mediocre company with below average engineers making cars worth not a lot, maybe nothing at all, for some reason is allowed to repeatedly cause significant suffering.

Given almost a decade of its “fire, ready, aim” crashes into giant trucks, Tesla clearly is riddled with dumb mistakes and design failures that harm the pubic.

The CEO of Tesla dangerously tried to rebrand simplistic cruise control with lane assist as “full self driving“.

His fraud car finally is being held somewhat accountable by the U.S. government.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said the Tesla software allows a vehicle to “exceed speed limits or travel through intersections in an unlawful or unpredictable manner increases the risk of a crash.” […] The recall covers 2016-2023 Model S and Model X vehicles, 2017-2023 Model 3, and 2020-2023 Model Y vehicles equipped with FSD Beta software or pending installation. U.S. senators… said the recall was “long overdue,” adding, “Tesla must finally stop overstating the real capabilities of its vehicles.”

The recall is for every single Tesla FSD on the road.

Surely everyone now realizes just how much money was wasted, how the market has been poisoned. Expensive “full of shit driving”, sold as a safety feature, instead has been involved many crashes and fatalities.

There is overwhelming evidence (as I loudly warned in my presentations since 2016) that Tesla software is unsafe, performing below any human driver. Worse, there’s evidence that human driver performance declines in a Tesla.

We’re talking here about really basic stuff, not even student driver stuff, like “rolling through some stop signs and driving the wrong way down one-way streets”.

Tesla officially failed a reasonable test, which means its owners should immediately file class action lawsuits.

The problem with its recall is that Tesla engineering is always so rushed to market and awful they regress safety when trying to fix their design failures.

Rapidly dumping bad code on top of bad code doesn’t improve bad code… one of their attempts at a recent recall just increased the danger. Their 2.0 was significantly worse at safety than their 1.0 version.

Moreover, Tesla removed hardware sensors that are necessary to prevent harm. They’re still not admitting that massive failure.

It’s a little like VW removing diesel cleaning hardware to cheat the law, except in Tesla’s case their cheats are actually killing people. A LOT of people.

The recall says everyone near a Tesla may be in immediate danger.

Think about that when you see any Tesla, and how their CEO repeatedly lies about solving hardware problems with magic software. No wonder I’ve been calling them a national security threat.

They run stop signs by design, FFS.

Ban Tesla already.

Clearly Tesla has repeatedly lied about safety and their CEO believes he can say anything with abandon to make money, even as hundreds are killed. It’s called permanent improvisation, or lawlessness.

The dumb irony in this story is Tesla shamelessly tells everyone its snake oil is a cure for cancer, and then it wants to personally regulate everyone on the importance of narrow and specific word definitions.

[Tesla PR] tweeted on Thursday that the word “recall” for an over-the-air software update is “anachronistic and just flat wrong!”

Yo yo yo, stop calling your basic lane assist “full self driving” and maybe someone will believe you really care about any meaning in words.

FSD has been the very literal definition of anachronistic, future capability indefinitely delayed. And it’s constantly been flat wrong, killing dozens at least. Anyone with advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) calling them “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) or other similar terms can be judged as FLAT WRONG.

Intentional disinformation about ADAS features (e.g. Tesla’s Autopilot and FSD only handle basic tasks — steering, braking, and acceleration — in basic scenarios) should be punishable. Tesla IS NOT CAPABLE full self driving, and their sloppy use of language has been killing a LOT of people.

What’s the harm in using the word recall for an actual recall? Yeah, it’s the right word and Elon Musk is obviously FLAT WRONG for demanding people use words only in ways that benefit him personally.

In related news, the co-founder of Tesla calls full-of-shit driving (FSD) just “risky crap” for short.

Let’s face it, Tesla thinks profit comes from destroying all safety regulations, destroying truth and science, so it can get away saying anything and profiting from fraud.

Would you expect anything more from them after they announced “driverless” would be completely solved by 2018 and they recommended drivers then go to sleep?

Talk about being DEAD wrong! The recall is small step and doesn’t go far enough.

Without fraud there would be no Tesla.

In a bizarre twist I’m sure nobody saw coming, Tesla’s lawyer has very publicly stated that speed doesn’t affect safety of their cars.

A speed limiter is not a safety device. Is it all right if they crash at 85 mph instead of 116 mph?

Uh, yes of course less speed is better.

Is this a joke? Physics 101 aside, why on earth would a lawyer hired to defend Tesla tell a jury the product is unsafe regardless of speed?

If slowing down doesn’t make the car safer before it crashes into something, then nothing will.

These suicidal free speed extremists at Tesla might as well remove the speed limiting brakes and declare them not a safety device either.