Tesla Robovan is an Old Joke: How Cold War Anti-Communism Invented the Art of Fake Technology Announcements

Most people have no idea that Silicon Valley was born out of WWII and engineering teams on the federal payroll. The problem at that time was a high rate of Americans being shot down over Europe (upwards of 50%), so the government poured money into technology as a method to increase survivability. The man put in charge decided to shift team operations from NY to Palo Alto because he grew up there and… the nice weather. It’s a foundational lesson in history that sets context for a mostly faked phenomenon of “individual innovators” that the Valley became known for instead of its actual government handouts.

If government handouts and fake innovation sounds familiar to the grain of truth that drives a grotesque Tesla fraud (falsely promising since 2013 to be inventing the safest car on the road, while actually delivering the least safe), it turns out modern disinformation follows a very old pattern from the Cold War.

The Tesla “survival Cybertruck” is a $100,000+ fraud that has been proven unable to survive 1,000 miles without basic and critical failures, for example. Tesla’s expensive “Full Self Driving” means low or no value supervised driving, as much as a premium paid for survival means an inability to survive without huge additional investments in time and money.

Similarly, the latest Tesla “mass transit Robovan” is yet another fake demonstration of something that is believable and will never be delivered.

A 1950s demo of the “Robovan” that has since been delivered worldwide, known as electric “Tram” service of major cities. Tesla just flipped the doors upside down in a weak attempt to pretend it had a new idea.
Syd Mead designed Star Trek, Tron, Blade Runner, 2001… the list goes on and on and includes the “Robovan” that runs in the Bay Area known as BART.

The reason Tesla’s vision won’t be delivered isn’t because anything it says is hard to do or innovative. After all, their “Robovan” demonstration was just a worse version of the Siemens electric light rail car that has been continuously improving since the 1870s and already serves many major cities. (Notably, Elon Musk didn’t know a single thing about manufacturing when his hostile takeover removed Tesla from its founders — Siemens was secretly rushed in at high cost to build the factories he later would claim as his own work.)

Siemens dominates the Tram market, with production of designs such as this one from a decade ago already

The reason Tesla won’t deliver what it taunts people with, yet again, is because of the intentions of the CEO presenting the vision.

He is a frightened white supremacist from South African apartheid trying to relive the Cold War mindset — strategic outcomes very different from delivering on public promises. I would go so far as to say someone within the American government is shoveling huge amounts of taxpayer money into his pockets, operating him as a willing idiot, asking only that he put on a completely fake “visionary” song and dance for today’s extremist aims. SpaceX, like Tesla, used Musk as a cover story for hiding a federally funded strategy beneath his antics and outside the accountability of government agencies.

If NASA had even one of the many SpaceX catastrophies, for example, funding would have been shut off years ago. Thus SpaceX takes old tax-payer funded innovations and pretends they came up with something on their own, to fool the public into looking away from what is actually being developed and why. It’s a loophole.

Let me give an example by way of a 1959 technology announcement by America in the thick of the Cold War. RCA and Whirlpool were spun into a totally faked demonstration kitchen of the future, in order to shame and spook the Soviets.

A footnote in history is that the West was desperate to counter how Communism empowered women. Washington was looking for a quick and easy narrative to hide oppressive mysogyny of capitalism. Women drivers of East Berlin electric trams were allegedly stopped at gunpoint when entering the West, to show without exaggeration just how hot the topics were getting. So how did the rampant mysogynists of the West cook up propaganda to fuel the idea women were more “liberated” in the West than from actual work and skills under Communism? Robots were demonstrated as “electronic miracles” in the West because… they took chores (power) away from women.

All of these electronic miracles are in existence. They are products of the David Sarnoff Research Center in Princeton, N. J., and scientists of the Radio Corporation of America are working today to make them available to you tomorrow. Let’s examine the automated house and its amazing Home Electronic Center, which consists of a miniaturized system of all-electronic mechanisms already lab-tested at Princeton. […] RCA engineers call this wonder system the Home Electronic Center Kid, or HECK. […] These are just some of the electronic miracles that you will live to see. They are in the labs today. They will be in your home tomorrow.

Source: November 1959 Mechanix Illustrated, “HOW RCA IS PLANNING YOUR WORLD OF TOMORROW” By James C. G. Conniff

What the HECK? Tomorrow for those living in 1959? This sounds very much like the marketing from Tesla in 2024 about their vision of black-face robots today that will replace women tomorrow. Did I mention Tesla’s vision specifically uses a black-face design?

The South African CEO of Tesla regularly promotes his black-face robots as obedient servants to whites and Asians.

Notably the Tesla “Robovan” reveal event was hosted by black-face service robots that secretly were operated remotely by men to appear autonomous.

The 1959 demonstration, just like the 2024 Tesla event, was in fact an intentional lie. It was a tool of disinformation to establish narrative dominance over… “the left”. America very strategically emphasized lying about “electronic miracles” to inflate itself as being “ahead” while angering the Soviets who advocated for women to gain work instead of lose it all. It was like Washington saying to Moscow “your poor women work real jobs and try to be equals in society to men, but our women already are replaced by robots and therefore… we are winning this war”.

1959 Robot cleans the floor with vacuums, scrubbers and a rinse, while the “housewife” stands by with nothing to do. Hard to believe? That’s because it was Cold War targeted information warfare to disrupt power.

To make an even finer point, the HECK deception was based on an actual 1957 patent, spun into a performance that America specifically put on in… Moscow.

The video hides the important fact that a person sat in a hidden room and remotely operated the “driverless” robot.

This is the exact sort of thing Tesla has repeatedly been accused of, by intentionally misleading audiences with low-quality “S3XY” cars and a black-face “Optimus” robot.

To be clear, a faked demonstration method was originally made infamous by the “Mechanical Turk” performance hundreds of years prior. The idea of lying and fraud about technology are obviously not anything new. However, there seems to be a direct connection from the anti-Communist ferver that allegedly justified propping up apartheid… to the “art” of running the Tesla fraud today.

The 1936 New York “Cleveland Mercury” was a bold investment during a financial downturn. 1920s aging heavy engines were covered up with a smooth shell, a design stunt that helped the rail company attract riders up to World War II. This 1936 legend is said to have be both the financial and design inspiration for Tesla’s antique-looking 2024 “Robovan” shell on top of its old 2012 electric engines.
The Tesla Electric Tram, a concept vehicle with no windows branded “Robovan” that is expected to trap passengers and demand payments to exit

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