Remember, folks, the Tesla CEO promised us the safest car on the road that would eliminate crashes by 2018. Instead, the brand has uniquely increased dangers to the point where if someone films a major highway there’s a high likelihood they’ll get footage of a Tesla crash.

A BBC camera crew has filmed a collision between two cars while preparing a news report about road safety on the Lincolnshire stretch of the A1.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this story is some obvious propaganda slinging from a highway spokesperson.

National Highways is responsible for the A1. A spokesperson said safety was its top priority. “The A1 generally performs well on safety. Nevertheless, we are never complacent and we recognise the concern that people have expressed.”

No. The A1 doesn’t perform well. That’s the point of the BBC turning on a camera to watch Tesla crash, the kind of reporting clearly ignored by the person claiming to be responding. And here’s context from the UK Parliamentary debates just a few days ago, 29th July 2024:

…we see a worrying proliferation in road accidents—all too often fatal—along our stretch of this ancient road. The Department for Transport’s data unfortunately demonstrates that proliferation. In 2022, there were 500 crashes on the A1, 26% more than the A5 and 16% more than the A2. In the last five years there have been 201 closures, the majority due to accidents. That averages out as an accident every two weeks, but unfortunately, in the few weeks leading up to this debate, we have seen four serious accidents, including one tragic death and three people seriously injured.

That’s the A1 not generally performing well by any standard.

Yes, there has been complacency. Here’s an example: saying “generally performs well” about a road that doesn’t perform well. Few phrases could show as much complacency about safety as this one: “generally performs well”.

At least the spokesperson didn’t say “but how was the rest of the play Mrs. Lincoln, generally performed well?”

And of course there is actually no evidence that public concerns are being recognized, which undermines any claim about top priority. In other words, recognition is an extremely low bar for safety concern and National Highways hasn’t even proven that.

Perhaps the absolute stupidity of Tesla safety failures, the constant sore thumb of any road and cause of crashes, will help highlight the A1 being a safety failure.

It’s been said by experts for over five years now, and finally is making major headlines. Tesla intentionally designed its cars to be less safe, far worse than other brands, and has put the public in grave danger.

Video and data gathered by the Wall Street Journal from over 200 Tesla Autopilot crashes reveals that longstanding concerns about Tesla’s camera-based technology, which differs from the rest of the industry, are showing up on the roads and putting the public at risk.⁠

Just the fact that the CEO loudly promised nearly every earnings call since 2014 that his Autopilot product will eliminate all crashes, yet over 50 people have died and 200 crashes were just easily sourced by a journalist, should be enough to ban the fraudulent carmaker.

The difference here, as opposed to when two people were killed by Tesla Autopilot in 2016 for example, seems to be that “financial analysts” are today echoing what safety experts have said all along.

The Model Y accelerated through an intersection as the car in front of us had only partly completed a right turn. My quick intervention was absolutely required to avoid an otherwise certain accident. [And it took the Tesla 40 seconds to notice I had] turned my head completely away from the road. […] Finally, in a section of our route, the highway was curvy and narrow, and had a solid white line separating lanes, signaling a prohibition against lane changes. Still, the Model Y switched lanes twice under that condition.

This review of FSD was just posted by a Tesla investor who clearly found the car is less capable of avoiding crashes than one made in 2016.

Think about such danger to the public as the long-time reality that investors shamefully ignored. Nearly a decade has passed with little to no improvements on a system that a CEO promised would be flawless by 2018 at the latest! The notion that this test had to be done in 2024, that Tesla has any investors at all anymore, is simply evidence of a massive fraud.

The Tesla CEO has said for almost a decade that full autonomy would likely happen ‘this year.’ Musk’s robotaxi initiative ‘relies on self-driving technology Musk has long promised but repeatedly failed to deliver.’

Without fraud there would be no Tesla.

A settlement announcement buries the lede, that public ownership exposed Lyft and Uber for being far less safe than Taxis.

Shareholders claimed that Lyft’s reputation suffered from the company’s inadequate training and background checks for drivers, including those with histories of sexual misconduct. They also said Lyft concealed the shortfalls before its March 2019 initial public offering…

Lyft has said the lawsuit was the last shareholder case arising from the IPO. Through Tuesday, Lyft’s share price had fallen 83% since the offering. Lyft shares were down 4% on Wednesday.

Many ride-share passengers have also accused Uber drivers of sexual assault. More than 300 lawsuits against Uber alleging such conduct have been combined into a federal class action pending in San Francisco. The number of plaintiffs could reach the thousands.

Imagine if the press had accurately portrayed Lyft and Uber as unsafe from their beginning, which wasn’t hard to figure out.

I used to live a block from Lyft HQ and wander into their offices to admire the giant “about us” mural they painted.

Basically Lyft was self-admittedly started by two young white guys who stole the name and concept of safety from a vacation they took to Southern Africa (admiring an Apartheid-derived parental Ride-Share “lift” for white children to avoid Black ones). The failed huge furry pink moustache should have been a tell. So how did anyone ever really think their move-fast ignore-history VC-run implementation would end well?

If you’ve watched Tesla crashes as much as I have, you see a pattern of them heading straight and blind into a pole, over and over and over again.

About 10.30pm Thursday 25 July emergency services were called to the roundabout at the intersection of Glynburn and Waterfall Terrace after reports a Tesla had left the road and crashed into a stobie pole.

It seems to be a software design flaw, especially when you consider the CEO has fraudulently touted “collision avoidance” capabilities since 2016 that have never arrived.

Related:

And also…

Total Recall After Waymo Robot Taxi Crashes Into Pole