The operator of a Tesla robot on public streets told police he kept giving it the order to stop, but the known defective robot design instead launched itself like a SpaceX rocket into urban traffic, instantly killing at least one Silicon Valley star and his dog.

According to the DA, Zhang told investigators he tried stopping, but the brakes in his Tesla did not respond. Verifying that claim will take time.

“That requires a significant vehicle inspection, generally done by the manufacturer of the vehicle,” Jenkins said. “It requires accident reconstruction. We need to figure out how fast he was going and a download of the black box that was in the vehicle.”

Romanenko worked at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, where on Wednesday a colleague said they all called him Misha and shared the following statement: “Misha was a valued team member for his talent, dedication and collaborative spirit. He was not only a talented engineer, but also a wonderful person who will be greatly missed.”

No official statement is expected for the implicated deadly design defect, because Tesla shut down it’s public relations communication to remove liability for things said; public safety data related to this “unimaginable loss” of life will be treated as proprietary secrets.

Instead, random robots on Twitter loosely affiliated with Tesla allegedly have begun usual astroturfed anti-regulation political campaigns. They push a notion there’s no way an American car company should have any responsibility for its known design defects that cause a robot to dangerously crash in the same manner as prior ones.

In fact, just six hours earlier on the same day in SF there was a very similar design defect crash as crucial foreshadowing.

What is the most likely explanation for these two very similar Tesla crashes in SF within hours (let alone the deadly one a few weeks ago in a similar downward off-ramp scenario)?

Tesla’s “driverless” has a critical design failure.

While the first crash on Sunday was a low-speed maneuver into a building by its owner that totalled only their Tesla, the latter one exploded into a mass casually attack killing Mikhael Romanenko.

Consider how a vehicle-borne threat to public safety at high-speed descended the Interstate 280 off-ramp onto 6th Street and ran through a red light. Perhaps the robot disengaged abruptly without warning and woke its sleeping owner, hurtling him half-asleep into city streets? We don’t know these details yet, but we can say any last second attempts to stop a high-speed malfunctioning robot did exactly the same worst fail-unsafe design thing seen before month after month… now hour after hour.

By comparison, China last year apparenlty had enough with Tesla sock puppets and safety loophole games causing predictable tragedy. The government openly and loudly, with public safety regulations front of mind let alone national security, banned the Tesla design defect that very likely caused this new tragedy in San Francisco.

If you haven’t been living under a rock, you must be aware of the many Tesla crashes allegedly caused by a sudden unintended acceleration (SUA) issue. Tesla owners reported that the car suddenly accelerated, and no amount of pressure on the brake pedal could make the car stop. This developed into a full-blown hysteria in 2020-2022 when people in China started protesting over Tesla’s alleged “brake problems.”

[…]

After a few crashes in China, local regulators forced Tesla to change the one-pedal driving logic. In May 2023, Tesla issued an important update in China… regulators are now taking another step and will formally legislate… to have one-pedal driving forbidden in China by 2026.

I’ll say it again. China two years ago forced Tesla to issue a critical safety update. Doesn’t it seem directly related?

China’s move toward a baseline of quality in technology highlights how predictable harms are predictable, and how vulnerable Silicon Valley has become. The trope of Chinese getting ahead is in fact a repeat of the Japanese raising quality and safety in the 1970s as real innovation. American car companies chose to fall behind, digging themselves deeper into anti-regulation quagmires of deadly defects.

Silicon Valley’s resistance to regulation thus mirrors Detroit’s stance in the 1970s, right before the personal consequences hit home and we all know the Ford Pinto fires or the Lee IaCocca seat-belt and airbag stories right? The lesson that easily preventable and predictable deaths should be handled by regulators, not require journalist-driven national-level outrage and Presidential action?

The death of one of their own has Silicon Valley VCs confronting an uncomfortable reality: their crusade for deregulated ‘disruption’ finally disrupted something more permanent than a market – it ended the life of a colleague. The same venture capital firms that championed Tesla’s ‘move fast and break things’ approach must now reckon with exactly what – and who – gets broken when building robots unsafe at any speed.

China (as well as Israel and elsewhere) has recognized such vehicles as potential weapons systems (let alone surveillance) requiring strict regulation, not just consumer products.

Reports say the Tesla robot with the latest unregulated AI capabilities reached nearly 100mph in two short blocks, ignoring all stop signals before slamming into stopped traffic — the logical result of a fail faster culture with zero regard for human lives deploying military-grade loitering munitions into dense civilian centers.