Over 40 people have been killed by Tesla, according to the latest data.
Tesla Deaths Total as of 9/4/2023: 449 | Tesla Autopilot Deaths Count: 41
The primary difference of Tesla versus OceanGate, aside from 10X the fatalities, is only one CEO has not been killed yet by his own fraud.
To put it another way, a Tesla Model X weighs 5000 lbs (as much as a truck) and is priced for high-cost engineering, yet even a sub-compact Honda has far safer lower control arms.
The plastic Tesla accelerator pedal design snaps off like a twig… and on and on, it’s a brand riddled with known and unnecessary safety failures.
Musk was willing to let some quality issues slide…. Tesla was building the airplane as Musk was heading down the runway for takeoff.
A new Vanity Fair article details the management culture that caused OceanGate tragedy under sea, but really it is about the absurdity of Elon Musk.
Carbon fiber is great under tension (stretching) but not compression (squeezing), he told me, offering an example: “You can use a rope to pull a car. But try pushing a car with a rope.”
The entire premise of OceanGate was false. Just like the completely backwards Tesla AI “vision” for driverless has always been a fraud.
The Vanity Fair writer calls this an “avoidable inevitable” disaster, which is a disturbing oxymoronic phrase. It sounds like something that should not be set into motion that is set into motion, and kills people.
There is evidence these CEOs want failures, want to see deaths, and do it to prove life doesn’t matter to them (e.g. the way a slave owner used to torture someone to death as a spectacle, or the Edison used to cruelly murder animals in public).
Why? It seems that in America, there is a tendency to overlook clear failures in ensuring safety, all while allowing unchecked experimentation under the guise of anti-regulation, with individuals who lack expertise defending this approach by claiming false certainty about the future.
In 1776, America rejected scientific reasoning, rejected adherence to established rules, and actively resisted safety precautions in its pursuit of creating a new nation for perpetuating slavery, even as the rest of the world was moving towards abolition. This decision was driven by a small group of white men who fancied themselves as pioneers, disruptors, and rule-breakers, and were willing to disregard the value of human life to expand slavery. It is the kind of men highlighted again by this Vanity Fair article.
As the world now knows, Stockton Rush touted himself as a maverick, a disrupter, a breaker of rules. So far out on the visionary curve that, for him, safety regulations were mere suggestions. “If you’re not breaking things, you’re not innovating,” he declared at the 2022 GeekWire Summit. “If you’re operating within a known environment, as most submersible manufacturers do, they don’t break things. To me, the more stuff you’ve broken, the more innovative you’ve been.” In a culture that has adopted the ridiculous mantra “move fast and break things,” that type of arrogance can get a person far. But in the deep ocean, the price of admission is humility — and it’s nonnegotiable…
In December 2015, two years before the Titan was built, Rush had lowered a one third scale model of his 4,000-meter-sub-to-be into a pressure chamber and watched it implode at 4,000 psi, a pressure equivalent to only 2,740 meters. The test’s stated goal was to “validate that the pressure vessel design is capable of withstanding an external pressure of 6,000 psi — corresponding to…a depth of about 4,200 meters.” He might have changed course then, stood back for a moment and reconsidered. But he didn’t. Instead, OceanGate issued a press release stating that the test had been a resounding success because it “demonstrates that the benefits of carbon fiber are real.”
This is the “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters” brag applied to science, as if it’s just a coin-operated popularity contest. Gravity doesn’t bother tinpot dictators who buy media companies to peddle anti-gravity snake-oil. Henry Ford purchased the Dearborn Independent newspaper with the intent of promoting harmful racist ideologies and a callous disregard for human life. This effort succeeded in persuading fervent supporters, including Adolf Hitler, with a web of egregious falsehoods that led to genocide.
In this situation, it’s essential to identify who possesses clear authority to prevent a dangerous plan that rejects science, disregards regulations, and poses a significant threat to human lives. When an individual in America claims that they are merely joking or experimenting, similar to how a toddler might behave, it raises questions about accountability. Such “inevitable but avoidable” plans to cause harm disregard the rights protected by any recognized authority and instead assert the unilateral power to define truth, often arguing that experiments with almost certain fatal outcomes should not be held accountable.
Across the annals of history, a stark and recurring theme emerges: the dramatic elevation of the right to unjustly put people into harms way, frequently accompanied by an unwavering commitment to ignorance (akin to the abusive nativist “Know Nothing” movement), often taking precedence over any fundamental right to life.
- Ugly past of U.S. human experiments uncovered
- Nazi Medical Experimentation
- The Surgeon Who Experimented on Slaves
When the OceanGate’s marine operations director issued an internal audit (Quality Control Inspection Report) filled with expert risk warnings, the CEO applied huge amounts of bogus legal pressure to kill it.
These included missing bolts and improperly secured batteries, components zip-tied to the outside of the sub. O-ring grooves were machined incorrectly (which could allow water ingress), seals were loose, a highly flammable, petroleum-based material lined the Titan’s interior… Yet even those deficiencies paled in comparison to what Lochridge observed on the hull. The carbon fiber filament was visibly coming apart, riddled with air gaps, delaminations, and Swiss cheese holes — and there was no way to fix that short of tossing the hull in a dumpster…
Rush’s response was to fire Lochridge immediately, serve him and his wife with a lawsuit (although Carole Lochridge didn’t work at OceanGate or even in the submersible industry) for breach of contract, fraud, unjust enrichment, and misappropriation of trade secrets; threaten their immigration status; and seek to have them pay OceanGate’s legal fees.
Excellent reporting from Vanity Fair.
Regrettably, as many are aware, the unfortunate sequence of events that followed involved the CEO taking his own life, along with the lives of his customers, in a tragedy that seemed preventable but sadly unfolded in a cult-like Kool-Aid disaster.
Safety experts, responsible for establishing explicit guidelines and regulations, could only watch in dismay as both OceanGate and Tesla customers ended their lives unnecessarily. Henry Ford surely would be impressed, probably in the same way he allegedly inspired Hitler and contributed to millions of deaths.
The best phrase to describe both OceanGate and Tesla comes from 2018, when Vanity Fair says a science expert was asked for advice on the design:
Do not get in…. He is going to have a major accident.
More like hundreds or more accidents. If the OceanGate CEO hadn’t been killed so early, his death chart likely would have looked like the tragedy of Tesla (which infamously stoked wildly large investments by claiming their unique vision would eliminate all deaths):
