For a decade now I have called out very vocally the catastrophically poor engineering culture of Tesla, which has predictably been leading to an explosion of defects and technical debt. In a 2016 security confernce keynote (after just the second Tesla “driverless” fatality) I called them out as a looming Titanic problem.

Unfortunately my warnings didn’t land, and the CEO continued unrestrained. A failure of the industry to self-regulate, or even the government to step in and prevent obvious public harms (e.g. Tesla corrupted the 2016 White House and NHTSA), brings us to where we are today.

There has been a documented lack of quality controls, let alone any real evidence of morality or ethics in Tesla, required for successful engineering. This is how and why it was so easy to see in 2016 and why it has very easily predictable disasterous results. Tests of Tesla “driverless” that I personally was involved with back then very quickly revealed high risk of catastrophy. Many could describe the fraud. But who didn’t listen?

The discussion now is shifting away from esoterism of safety expertise and obscure security conferences, necessarily moving now to law offices, as the big questions about civil and even criminal code enforcement come into focus for the general public.

Notably Elon Musk is engaged in noisy propagandist defense tactics, seemingly very worried about his exploding legal troubles and accountability for his huge mistakes. He’s been on his social media soapbox lately fretting that prosecution of Americans by a jury might lead to conviction of criminals, even though that’s exactly what’s supposed to protect society from people like him.

In fact we have seen dozens of people unnecessarily killed by Tesla in what amounts to be a long-running advance fee fraud scheme based on false “safety” claims about future technology that never arrives. Tesla’s very aggressively positioned legal team meanwhile has very quickly settled two high profile death cases, in an obvious hush and hide strategy.

Take just one example of the trend. Elon Musk overruled safety experts and forced his engineers to remove radar from “driverless” road robots, while also claiming a concern for “safety”. The sad result, from May 2021 to May 2024, was these Tesla robots more than doubled their death toll. Think about the kind of robot company that in five years (2016-2021) already had killed more people than in the whole prior history of robots, and then it removed safety sensors…. Is that not criminal?

Paying the families of victims to stay silent isn’t going to scale well.

I mean imagine the Titanic CEO looking at his ship sunk by an iceberg, and then demanding ships remove telescopes to see even less. Are experts supposed to be surprised to see double the death toll?

The logic supposedly floated by Tesla management about their safety strategy sounds so dumb as to be almost unbelievable (paraphrasing): “humans see with only four highly sophisticated light and sound sensors (eyes and ears) so why can’t we quickly and cheaply replace humans with two cheap video cameras and some rushed software?”

As someone who helped support early development at Space Applications of GPS and modern HUD technology to solve for low-altitide low-visibility transit and prevent further high-cost catastrophes (e.g. Operation Eagle Claw brownout)… the Tesla “know-nothing” PR stunts to trick the public have been for me like a decade of nails on chalkboard.

If I stick two plastic googly-eyes on a car hood and call it “Alice the driverless car” I would be tapping into and manipulating the same human positive belief system that Tesla has been using for its fraud. Social engineering hacks aren’t rocket science, unfortunately. And worse, the counter-measures against advance fee fraud attacks are very difficult, as I’ve discussed here since 2005.

Now, after I recently helped document the constant exodus of top lawyers from Tesla following an exodus of top engineers, I noticed that the lawsuits are piling up as fast or faster than the technical debt and deaths.

Expect 2024 to go up, way up.

A rising curve of legal trouble probably looks sadly familiar to regular readers of this blog, who monitor tesladeaths.com along with me. Here’s the chilling reminder again that in 2016 we could have done more and prevented hundreds of unnecessary deaths.