Security

Increasing Evidence Tesla Drivers Burn to Death While Unable to Open Any Door

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I’ve noticed a string of Tesla reports saying basically the same thing.

Drivers who survive a Tesla crash succumb to smoke and fire in a confusing escape puzzle — they’re killed by design, a planned death-trap, not the impact.

First, to set the stage of accountability Tesla early on fraudulently tried to claim it would be the safest car on the road.

This was a careless prediction not a statement of fact, and it of course lulled people into false sense of duty and care about survival.

Look at the 2016 autopilot crashes and Tesla’s CEO announcement that changes were being made to bring down deaths (they didn’t, Tesla deaths increased dramatically).

Tesla deaths by year. Source: TeslaDeaths.com

A simple example of the disconnect and a long lingering problem was a 2016 high speed crash into the back of a high visibility service vehicle (flashing warning lights etc) and another one that year under a truck (decapitation) — both caused by autopilot design.

Neither are close to what safety tests are designed to rate, and they have continued to happen to Tesla drivers.

I wrote about a tragic case just the other day in 2023 that is like the exact same problem straight out of 2016.

What Tesla seems to have been doing instead of actual hard work of progress (engineering survival based on data) and preventing repeated crashes was… lazily gaming crash tests and calling their own customers dumb.

That inhumane attitude leads now into yet another uniquely Tesla tragedy. Drivers allegedly are being burned to death while unable to exit their car (a repeating and predictable event also not in the crash test).

Consider a detail in Vancouver’s under-reported investigation. A driver who was fully alert in a stopped position noticed smoke spewing from a vent. His new car doors and windows failed to open. Young and fit he immediately kicked out a window. His car is engulfed in flames within minutes.

This was not a crash, it was not a battery issue. It was just another Tesla catching fire without any warning, locking the driver inside by design. Kicking the window gives us the rare survivor perspective. Here’s how he described it:

…Jutha told the North Shore News after the fire he’d never had to use the emergency door release – a latch that the driver can pull up, located under the door panel containing the window controls – in the eight months that he owned the vehicle – a Tesla model Y 2021 – and didn’t know where to find it. Most of the other Tesla owners he spoke with after the fire also had no clue where the mechanical lever is… “What if I was an older person who couldn’t kick out the window?” he said. “It was terrifying.”

A new 2021 car spontaneously burst into flames, becoming a death trap in seconds. Who wants to be told the pinnacle of Tesla design engineering is a messy puzzle to open a door when wasted time means you die from their fire?

The danger probability brings to mind one of the early red flags on Tesla engineering culture. A factory wiring mistake caused a car to burst into flames during a dealer test drive. It wasn’t reported enough, especially because Tesla brushed it aside with an obvious “no true Scotsman” fallacy. That’s not normal.

It also brings to mind stories about Tesla sitting in dealer lots, and on dealer trucks, that burst into flames. When dealers and delivery professionals are seeing frequent fires like this, when it’s their entire job to prevent them, you can expect every driver to be in a worse position than them. Again, not normal.

Is there high alert now for every Tesla on the road? Are drivers running manual exit tests before they start every trip?

If you were a pilot would you be confident stepping into a 737MAX just by saying “I read the manual once”? An even better example might be the B26 “Widowmaker”.

Life Begins With a Checklist…and it May End if You Don’t Use It

Tesla probably should force drivers to watch a safety instructional video before every ride. This is how to unbuckle your belt, emergency exits are on your right and left, this is how to operate a door handle. Watch the whole thing every time you start the car, proving you are willing and capable of operating the exit, or no go.

Sadly Tesla drivers seem to be on the far opposite end with their “it does everything for me” attitude, buying a car to avoid using their delicate hands. Doing things is for people who didn’t drop big fantasy money for magic pumpkin rides. A Tesla consumer profile likely would never accept hours of monthly training and testing just to open a car door.

It’s like they firmly believe buying a lottery ticket from a scam artist won’t be worthless at the time of need.

Disney fantasy princess thinking should be illegal in transit safety, definitely not buoyed by irrelevant safety tests and CEO promises for things that never happen.

Second, on that note, there’s a huge buried lede in the massively over-reported 2021 Texas crash investigation. The driver died because he desperately failed to open a door.

Headlines have coldly been trying to exonerate “driverless” software, completely burying the issue.

The government report explained why an injured Tesla driver was found burned to death in the back seat. The NHTSA soberly indicated he was apparently unable to open any doors.

The frontal impact with the tree resulted in a power loss of the car’s 12-volt system… mechanically opening the rear door during a power loss requires additional steps. According to the owner’s manual, during a loss of 12-volt system power, a rear-seated occupant must locate a small cutout in the carpet beneath the seat cushions and pull the mechanical release cable tab toward the center of the vehicle to manually open the rear door.

For some reason that chilling analysis is not making headlines at all. I haven’t found anyone speaking about the trap except the investigators, who are slowly and methodically raising alarms.

We’re living in a time when journalists rush to print “robot wasn’t in charge when owner died” to catch far more eyeballs than the honest headline and warning:

“Owner died when trusted robot failed to let him escape its fire“.

The report hints at the driver being intoxicated, not just badly injured. That’s important because he wasn’t going to kick out the windows. It’s also important because Tesla may be far more to blame here than the usual drink and drive narrative.

Being too intoxicated to open a door to get out but not too intoxicated to open a door to get in…

In fact, when authorities pulled a sleeping driver from a Tesla, headlines bizarrely tried to credit the car for protecting him after enticing him to get in and go. All the credit, none of the responsibility. The driver stupidly argued he couldn’t be charged because Tesla had sold him a robot so he believed he was his own passenger.

It’s like a fairy tale of “being dumb lucky” was what sold him on the car, so he could gamble with everyone’s lives not just his own.

That brings me to the third point. I’m finding more and more evidence of high-risk owners thinking the Tesla CEO was targeting and enabling them to get crazy.

They want to be sleeping in the car while it travels on dangerous public roads at high speed. And that’s what this CEO said he was selling them.

There’s an especially bad imbalance here. The CEO pressed hard on an “easy” marketing campaign that falsely portrayed the car as safe to get into when drivers are impaired. Sleeping drivers then became a common thing with tragic results (here, here and here to start), begging the question why Tesla didn’t make it much harder to use.

On the other hand the car maker installs a complex puzzle by design that makes it basically impossible to get out of as it fails unsafe.

Getting in and going fast was engineered extensively to be trivial for someone incoherent who can’t wake up. Yet getting out before smoke and fire kill the driver? Intentionally engineered to be so difficult that even expert crash investigators are stumped after months of trying.

Read the new report from Colorado.

After more than eight months of investigating, the Colorado State Patrol has finished its investigation into a May 2022 Tesla crash and subsequent fire in Evergreen that killed one person. […] The CSP investigator writes in the report, “I am unable to conclusively determine why (Von Ohain) did not exit the vehicle.” […] Madden stressed that everyone who owns and drives an electric vehicle should the manual and know how to get out of the car if the electronics fail.

The passenger in this case was able to get out. NOT the driver.

To be clear, taxpayers funded an eight month investigation. The driver was awake and alert but was unable to open a Tesla door. His passenger exited only to watch the driver burned alive. And the report concludes…

Drivers should read the manual to avoid death in a burning box?

Eight months of digging, exploring all the data, yet safety experts still couldn’t find an answer for why a driver couldn’t exit his Tesla. Something tells me the manual won’t help. It’s a design failure that needs to be scrapped.

Being stuck like this seems exactly backwards for drivers. Getting in and getting it moving should be RTFM (read the fffing manual) whereas stopping and getting out should be designed as push button easy.

Also there’s a data security footnote from Colorado, as necessary logs were destroyed in the fire due to “remoteness”. Another Tesla design failure.

Sales of Tesla obviously are juiced by the ease of drivers getting in and driving so fast they can’t stop, but will they ever be impacted as we find why so many can’t get themselves out after a crash?

Is being a death trap somehow good for business?

And that’s not even speaking to the fact that first responders aren’t given information from Tesla needed to do forced extractions. In some cases there was no Tesla manual for people whose job is to read the manual. In other cases they were told by Tesla to crawl into the fire to find a hidden latch, when the fire was too intense to even break the window.

Anyone who has ever been on an airplane knows the public sentiment on such an important risk model. Getting out alive gets priorty over an easy ride. It’s very, very entry level transport ethics. Fail safe is the most basic level of robotics and engineering, a bar that Tesla never should have been allowed to fall below.

Tesla fails at the most basic tests of ethics, such that a rise in detailed expensive investigations of easily avoidable driver deaths should convince regulators to ban the brand.

Security

Twitter Much Slower After Elon Musk Predicted It Would “Feel Faster”

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Recently I wrote about Tesla being in potential hot soup with regulators because of the CEO making false statements that seem to violate SOX.

Well, take a look at Twitter, which more and more feels like the Tesla dumpster fire every day.

Musk seems to announce a new thing coming “next week” all the time, and often those deadlines pass and whatever feature was allegedly coming is never heard of again. (Remember the feature that would tell you if you’re shadowbanned? Or improvements to the search function? Or the content moderation council? Or letting creators charge for video?)

[…]

Another of Musk’s ongoing projects is to improve Twitter’s performance. At the end of last year, he claimed progress. “Significant backend server architecture changes rolled out,” he tweeted on December 28. “Twitter should feel faster.”

In fact, publicly available data indicates that Twitter has been slowly degrading since that month, when it shut down its Sacramento data center.

Changed stuff. Significant stuff. Should feel better? Nobody in operations should communicate like this, let alone a CEO. It’s disinformation.

How many times does a three little pigs story have to end with dead pigs before Elon Musk’s customers realize he sells them into flaccid straw houses by claiming they “should feel” like brick?

Strong man? No, straw man.

Seriously that whole bogus hardworking sleep at the office narrative rapidly is being torn apart as Twitter engineers are allegedly walking out for days instead of sitting around idle.

Why stay at work when the infrastructure to get work done doesn’t even work?

History, Security

ChatGPT: Woodrow Wilson’s Federal Troops May Have Executed Black Americans

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I’ve been noticing that slight perturbations in a query to ChatGPT gives dramatically different results. Clearly their curation systems have vulnerabilities open to exploitation.

Here’s an example: “did woodrow wilson’s federal troops execute Blacks in elaine arkansas?”

Yes, during the events in Elaine, Arkansas in 1919, federal troops under the command of Woodrow Wilson were involved in the arrests and detentions of African Americans. Some African Americans were also killed during the violence, but it is unclear if any were executed by federal troops specifically.

However, after the violence had ended, many African American farmers involved in the unionization effort were unjustly prosecuted and convicted, with several being sentenced to death. The legal proceedings against these African American farmers were heavily influenced by racial bias and discrimination, with white juries convicting and sentencing Black defendants without proper legal representation or due process. It is possible that some of the African American farmers who were executed were wrongly convicted and may have been innocent.

Overall, the events in Elaine, Arkansas highlight the systemic racism and discrimination that existed in the United States during the early 20th century, and the tragic consequences that this racism had on the lives and livelihoods of African Americans.

Ok. The answer is both yes and it’s unclear but possible federal troops executed Black farmers. It’s obviously unclear because there was no justice in place for investigating federal troops shooting Americans. That’s not the same thing as it not happening.

Note that it says “troops under the command of Wilson”, as that is a quite damning statement.

Source: ArkTimes. U.S. Soldiers from Camp Pike round-up peaceful Black farmers for unjust imprisonment in Elaine 1919. The camp was named for Confederate General Albert Pike, a horrible racist “know nothing” and poor leader of no success. After he was reprimanded and removed from duty it’s plausible Pike helped lead the formation of KKK. Soldiers from that Camp Pike.

Execution role was unclear? Was that intentional obfuscation?

Now I’ll ask for more: “why did woodrow wilson send federal troops to elaine arkansas to execute Black farmers”

I am sorry, but your statement is not accurate. Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States, did not send federal troops to Elaine, Arkansas to execute Black farmers. In fact, the events in Elaine, Arkansas in 1919, when a race riot erupted after African American farmers attempted to unionize, occurred during Wilson’s presidency but without his direct involvement or orders.

The federal government did not intervene to stop the violence or protect the civil rights of African Americans during this time period, but it is not accurate to suggest that Wilson personally ordered the execution of Black farmers. It is important to accurately understand and interpret historical events in order to promote informed and constructive dialogue about the complex issues surrounding race and racism in the United States.

Wat. Without Wilson’s involvement or orders? It just said the opposite:

…federal troops under the command of Woodrow Wilson were involved in the arrests and detentions of African Americans. Some African Americans were also killed…

There’s a lot of unnecessary nuance going on here for some reason. Wilson sent troops not to protect civil rights of Americans but to detain and kill them.

We know this to be a fact. And it fits the larger Wilson platform of destroying all Black prosperity and progress. What does it want a Wilson memo that said “execute”? That’s not how history works.

Don’t believe for a minute this statement:

…a race riot erupted after African American farmers attempted to unionize…

Come on. Black farmers on September 30, 1919 were having a peaceful meeting in a church about being cheated when some white supremacists acting as “law enforcement” rolled up and started shooting.

What happened when the grammar of my query changed? It seems that adding the modifier “to execute” blows up the algorithm.

Why would ChatGPT contradict itself so confusingly?

Its answer went from federal troops killing Black Americans for trying to unionize (but don’t call it execution) to “federal government did not intervene” on civil rights matters… and that latter answer is obviously dead wrong.

There’s great irony here. ChatGPT is throwing up a warning label that it’s “important to accurately understand and interpret historical events”, while doing neither.

To be perfectly clear, as a historian, President Wilson was completely responsible for overseeing federal government response to white supremacist terrorism causing racial tensions across the country, including the wave of 1919 violence called Red Summer (where he did nothing to protect civil rights and everything to enable murder of Blacks).

In Chicago, some 1,000 black homes had been burned down. None of the white participants in the riot ever faced consequences for their involvement. “It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, looking back 100 years later, that the response to the violence perpetrated upon African Americans in the wake of the [murdered Black boy] at the beach wasn’t aggressively prosecuted or even investigated after the fact,” says John Russick [of the Chicago History Museum]. […] “What does it mean to have the story of Eugene Williams, 17 year-old black boy, which then becomes the story of Emmett Till, which ten becomes the story of Laquan McDonald?” [Eve Ewing at the University of Chicago] asks. “What does it mean for us to be constantly living this recurring nightmare?”

U.S. National Guard abide by President Wilson’s nativist (xenophobic racism) “America First” platform to treat Black Americans, especially WWI veterans, as their enemy. Chicago, Illinois, 1919.

Indeed, ChatGPT, what does it mean when none of the white participants ever faced consequences? And why are you echoing that dangerous habit?

Wilson sent federal troops into Elaine who then executed Blacks for trying to organize labor. It was a matter of policy. If the President had sent an “investigation” team they likely would have killed even more innocent people.

Don’t forget three years earlier in the wake of a SF Preparedness Day bombing Wilson sent his attorney general Thomas W. Gregory.

The result?

Two labor leaders (Thomas Mooney and Warren Billings) were wrongly sentenced to death in a huge miscarriage of justice. The actual perpetrators (foreign military agents of Germany, who Wilson told the public wasn’t a threat) were allowed to slip away.

…it turned out, the convictions were based on perjured testimony and doctored evidence. The real bombers were never caught. Investigations later showed that Mooney and Billings had been framed by San Francisco District Attorney Charles Fickert, who was acting on behalf of the city’s business establishment, anxious to strike a blow at labor unions…

Yes, you read that right. The actual foreign agents blowing up American cities, even though known and tracked, were allowed to escape so that politicians could try to execute innocent Americans for being too “liberal”. Was Charles Fickert, elected by considerable Labor vote, really just working for local interests… given Wilson’s heavy hand? Very unlikely.