A buried environmental harm lede can be found in a story about the unique nature of Tesla car crashes and fires:
Luckily, testing of the ground in the area did not show any contamination, he said. Current estimates are that it could cost between $100 to $150 apiece to clean up the battery cells, putting the total cost of the cleanup at more than $1 million.
That’s one car, one crash, at an incredibly high rate of speed into a tree. The car batteries being spread all over the place are one giant factor in this case, but how often do we get to see hard estimates of real environmental costs?
And why do I call the Tesla battery danger unique? Because, not least of all, Tesla calls themselves unique. Their very special (immoral) engineering culture manifests into a nightmare unlike any other car:
Model 3, capable of hitting 60 mph in 2.9 seconds… left the Tesla heading straight into oncoming traffic, as indicated in this photo taken from the Tesla Model 3 seconds before the crash. With the Model 3 hitting nearly 50 mph and still accelerating, the plaintiff was able to avoid the oncoming traffic, an Amish buggy and utility poles before slamming into the building [seriously injuring a woman at her desk who died two weeks later].”
Perhaps a former NHTSA senior safety adviser said it best?
Tesla is having more severe — and fatal — crashes than people in a normal data set
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.
“Nice $80k black hole for money that almost got us killed. Thanks a lot Elon.” Complaint filed for safety failure on brand new Tesla. Source: Jalopnik, which also includes a flurry of bizarre Twitter attacks on this complaint as context of “…you really have to hand it to Tesla for inspiring this degree of crazy, evidence-denying loyalty among their fans. […] It’s a strange part to fail, though, really. It is a part subject to intense stresses, but it’s not like it’s particularly complex or poorly understood—this is some Cars 101 shit right here. It’s a control arm. No need to call SpaceX to consult, because this is absolutely not rocket science. This is also the kind of failure, that, were it to happen at speed, could potentially cause a wreck that could result in, potentially, people getting hurt. A week-old car should not have problems like this. Hell, a car a decade or more old shouldn’t have control arms just snapping. This is ridiculous. and the idea that a car with no evidence of a major accident shouldn’t have this covered by warranty is absurd as well.”
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.
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.
American autoworkers and their children in 1941 protest Ford’s relationship with Hitler. Source: Wayne State
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):
Tesla attracted investors by promising it would revolutionize car safety. Immediately the reverse happened as it started killing more people than other brands. Today it is an outlier with its extremely high death tolls; one out of every ten “Autopilot” crashes being fatal. Source: Tesladeaths.com
…Tuesday at about 9:30 a.m. in the parking garage of the Methodist Hospital at 17201 North Freeway S.
The crash happened when a red Tesla was driving westbound through the parking lot. Authorities said the driver was going at a high rate of speed and hit a concrete wall.
The parking lot crash was of course next to the emergency room, but victims were sent to another location.
Think about the absurdly fast 0-60 performance of the Tesla when it’s combined with a significant design flaw. Most everyday drivers, let alone the octogenarians in this tragedy, don’t have the reaction speed required to prevent a Tesla-related tragedy.
The two victims were sent to another hospital ten minutes away (Memorial Herman Hospital of The Woodlands) where less than an hour later they succumbed to their injuries.
Tesla must be the first production car brand in history to so violently kill two people in a parking lot right outside hospital emergency rooms.
ESET reports the app went undetected in the Google Play store for a year:
The malicious Signal Plus Messenger app was initially uploaded to Google Play on July 7th, 2022, and it managed to get installed more than a hundred times. […] Based on code similarities, we can assign Signal Plus Messenger and FlyGram to the BadBazaar malware family, which has been previously used against Uyghurs and other Turkic ethnic minorities outside of China.
