The original sin. A Tesla S killed a cyclist when it was first released, which allegedly prompted Elon Musk to promise he would make an Autopilot to end all deaths. Instead, after a decade of rising fatal crashes, Tesla with Autopilot are now the unmistakable cause of more death than without.
A 56-year-old Snohomish man had set his Tesla Model S on Autopilot and was looking at his cellphone on Friday when he struck and killed a motorcyclist in front of him in Monroe, court records show.
Are motorcyclists being trained to avoid being killed by a Tesla behind them?
Police say in this case the use of Autopilot is to be charged as vehicular manslaughter.
The trooper cited the driver’s “inattention to driving, while on autopilot mode, and the distraction of the cell phone while moving forward,” and trusting “the machine to drive for him” as probable cause for a charge of vehicular manslaughter, according to the affidavit.
We could have all seen this predictable end back in 2016, which is why back then I described Tesla as the modern Titanic. Despite my warnings, far too many people fell into the fraud.
Five years ago this week [in 2019], Elon Musk stood on stage at Tesla’s Autonomy Week and told the crowd that his company would deliver fully autonomous robotaxis by the following year. “I feel very confident,” he said. “Mark my words.”
2020 was a long time ago in technology terms. Arguably Tesla has only gotten worse since then.
It’s very strange to me that people don’t see the company shouting the white supremacist tag 88 (“Heil Hitler”) all over the place as being obvious enough evidence of Nazism.
So here’s yet another example from Tesla that I was just asked about.
What’s the story behind a car company registering the term “Cyberhammer” at the start of 2024 and then recently announcing they would be giving actual branded hammers away?
Let’s start with the very precise number of hammers announced, because it matters.
We got #29 of 800 Tesla CyberHammers out there. I spent 35,000 referral points to get it, and you can’t actually buy it with cash. A simple design, it only comes in matte black…
Someone at Tesla probably decided 88 would be too few and maybe even overused symbolism, so they went with one of Hitler’s favorite numbers instead: only 800 hammers are being made to be “earned”.
In his mind, Hitler’s “thousand-year Reich” would serve as the natural conclusion of a process that he traced back to the coronation of Charlemagne in 800.
Nazis see the number 800 as a reference the starting year of the First Reich. Perhaps even more important they also reference it as a starting number of adherents to a nascent Third Reich.
Notably, a specific event in October 1922 allegedly involved 800 NSDAP members instructed by Hitler to unleash mob violence and abruptly seize control of a local German government.
These 800 men (more likely around 600) known as the “Zug Nach Coburg” hammered against democracy, achieving mythical significance for Nazis and especially Hitler, which sparks debate even to this day.
How can you annotate an 800-page monologue exposing Hitler’s insane worldview? After every single line [of Mein Kampf] you would have to write, ‘Hitler is wrong here’…
The violent march of 800 men on a small town, in other words, was detailed in Hitler’s 1925 propaganda that infamously swept up readers. Coburg then became the first town in Germany to put the NSDAP in power and the first to gift Hitler honorary citizenship. By 1931 the swastika flag officially was raised for the first time in front of a German government building… in Coburg.
We should think about contextualizing 800 adherents “earning” hammers, just like 88, as a significant reference point for Nazis today signaling intent to forcibly destroy America.
Why then hammers?
Does the name Cyberhammer seem odd, contradictory and irrelevant to a car company promoting “futurist” technology? Here’s the simple explanation for why it is very on brand.
Thor’s Hammer symbol has been appropriated by neo-Nazis and other white supremacists…
On it’s own a hammer would not have raised alarms, yet Tesla has the long and obvious habit of numbers that whistle to white supremacists.
Tesla bothered to announce exactly 800 hammers, as if trying to troll for a violent anti-democratic mob like it’s October 1922 again.
And although people describe it as a “simple design”, the hammer has the particular word “FRANZ” prominently written. It could be any Franz, even a Franz who works at Tesla, but come on…
Franz von Papen was instrumental in promoting Adolf Hitler to become chancellor of Germany in 1933, which violently smashed democracy, as retold in a 1980s film infamous among white supremacists based in Texas.
Pink performs a song in which he expresses a desire to line all of the “queers,” “Jews,” and “coons” in his audience “up against the wall” and shoot them. In obvious references to the Holocaust, he sings of the “final solution” and “waiting to turn on the showers and fire the ovens.” The swastika is replaced by Pink’s symbol: two crossed hammers, which he boasts will “batter down” the doors behind which frightened minorities hide from his fascist supporters.
If a car runs a red light at speed in 2024 it probably goes without saying that police will be investigating Tesla yet again.
An SUV was traveling south on Fifth Avenue through the William Street intersection around 4:15 p.m. on Thursday, April 18, when a Tesla going east on E. William Street went through a red light…
The crash force from the heavy Tesla was sufficient to flip an SUV upside down.