Security

Tesla Claims It Now Detects Flashing Safety Lights… Five Years Late

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Update September 27: Five police officers injured by Tesla have filed a lawsuit.

According to the suit: “The officers want to hold Tesla accountable, and force Tesla to publicly acknowledge and immediately correct the known defects inherent in its Autopilot and collision avoidance systems, particularly as those impact the ongoing safety of our nation’s first responders.” The lawsuit claims Tesla’s autopilot system has been linked to at least 12 crashes in the United States involving first responders working active scenes with flashing lights.

Texas police officers are suing Tesla on a principle it “over serves” intoxicating information to car owners, which (like over serving alcohol) makes the company as liable as a bar or bartender for crashes.

Lately there have been multiple stories about drivers pulled from Tesla who are sleeping drunk and try to claim it’s ok because they were told by Tesla and its CEO the car could drive itself.

These five officers would thus be entirely correct to emphasize a need to “publicly acknowledge” known defects and stop such a poisonous scam.

Here’s just one example: recently in California (September 21) a driver asleep in a Tesla was reported by a car behind her (who happened to be her husband) and police used flashing lights on a vehicle in front to force a stop.

In radio transmissions the troopers could be heard describing how the car was driving itself with the unconscious driver in it. “The reporting party is advising that his wife is unconscious in a Tesla. The vehicle is driving itself,” the emergency dispatcher said on the recordings. “It ended up TC’ing (traffic collision) into the right shoulder wall, and, uh, still continuing.”The dispatcher then added that the suspect’s husband was following the Tesla in his Volkswagen car.

The Tesla hit the wall at low speed? The sleeping driver was awoken, given a DUI test and failed. And now onto the actual blog post…

The first Tesla “Autopilot” crash fatality was January 2016. It crashed into the back of a high visibility service vehicle with flashing safety lights.

Did you know? Have you read about it before?

Tesla at that time (again, we’re talking about January 2016) made bold statements it would be the one to take decisive and quick action to prevent it happening again.

Company founder Elon Musk said the firm was in the process of making improvements to its auto pilot system aimed at dramatically reducing the number of crashes blighting the model S. Autopilot can keep a constant speed, keep the car in lane and apply the brakes automatically. Musk has said that he wants to make improvements to Autopilot since last year, but he was told it couldn’t be done for various technical reasons. He said: “We really pushed hard on questioning all of those assumptions over the past few months. “It was just a very hard problem. Nobody else could solve this.”

Since then, Teslas repeatedly crashed in the same basic way causing injury and death, with no real updates from them to explain why they keep failing while others do not seem to have the high crash risk of Tesla.

Source: tesladeaths.com

Finally in August 2021 the US government announced it would look into this as negligence by Tesla, which seems ridiculously late when it could have been an immediate reaction to help avoid many preventable deaths.

NHTSA says it has identified 11 crashes since 2018 in which Teslas on Autopilot or Traffic Aware Cruise Control have hit vehicles at scenes where first responders have used flashing lights, flares, an illuminated arrow board or cones warning of hazards. The agency announced the action Monday in a posting on its website.

And then September 2021 the “Truth_Tesla” disinformation account on Twitter abruptly announced Tesla could now detect an emergency light and slow down for safety.

Source: Twitter

There’s quite a bit to unpack in that one tweet.

Of course this begs the question why the company waited five years? Why take sooooo long?

Why did so many people have to die first?

The answer seems to be a government action has scared Tesla into action, unlike the loss of human lives.

More to the point, “Truth_Tesla” points to a GAO report and shares a tiny snippet of the following paragraph:

These data indicate that there are relatively few fatalities and injuries from
crashes involving emergency vehicles in general. Our analysis of 2018 FARS and CRSS data shows that overall, there were 112 fatalities from crashes involving emergency vehicles, representing 0.3 percent of all traffic fatalities that year. The total number of traffic injuries involving an emergency vehicle in use was estimated to be about 8,000, or 0.3
percent of all estimated traffic injuries that year. Further, our review of the separate “related factors” data variable to identify emergency responders involved in crashes found that out of 14 individuals who were either emergency services personnel or law enforcement officers involved in a fatal crash in 2018, 11 were killed and 3 had non-fatal injuries.

The simple logic here should be if you can make a minor engineering change to save a life, would you make that change? The answer has to be yes.

However, at Tesla the answer seems to have been a big NO for FIVE YEARS despite many crashes.

Looking closer at the Tesla announcement, it also has caveats.

…detects lights from an emergency vehicle when using Autosteer at night on a high speed road…

Has to be on a “high speed” road at night time only? If it only functions on highways at night, that’s basically a sensor for lights where there are no other lights, which is like not being any kind of real flashing lights sensor at all (just a basic light sensor).

Important here to remember that the January 2016 fatality from running into emergency vehicle lights was… during the day.

If you follow all of the GAO analysis, they’re showing a lot of time and energy has been spent since the 1990s to get to a zero crash report. Tesla in 2016 should have sent alarm bells off, and certainly by 2018 should have been in serious trouble.

Now consider how “Truth_Tesla” offers a value system that argues if only a small percentage of people are dying or injured then why bother looking at Tesla being a cause at all. They literally say this in a tweet:

NHTSA is only aware of 17 such Ambulance injuries since 2018 that involved Teslas (!), well below Tesla’s share of miles driven.

Imagine if a driver drove into a service vehicle and killed or injured someone, then got out of the car and said “in my defense that’s one person, a statistically insignificant number, so I should get to do this wrong thing many more times”… or “this terrible crash I just caused is well below my share of miles driven”.

Truth_Tesla then attempts a “please clap” for a minor engineering change long overdue; a neck-snapping flip from “why care about statistically insignificant events” to “everyone look over here and care about us because we did something easy”.

History, Security

Tesla is a Scam. Scientists Repeatedly Attacked by Car Maker

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Edmunds’ scientists apparently made Tesla very angry when the car maker failed a simple test of real-world range:

Some electric vehicles dramatically exceeded the EPA’s range estimates, while others fell short. Most notably, all five Tesla vehicles we tested missed those estimates.

Edmunds said they received an unpleasant response from Tesla as the car maker demanded a retest using special considerations and adjustments (that a zero range doesn’t actually mean zero and should be tested as a completely opaque not-zero amount).

Needless to say, Tesla was not happy with our test results, and we received a phone call. Tesla’s engineers disputed our figures.

Tesla cars, now overtly described by their engineers as based on lies (zero doesn’t mean zero) then failed the tests again.

Even allowing for the additional miles recorded after an indicated zero, only two of the six Teslas we tested would hit their EPA figures in our real-world conditions.

If that debate outcome wasn’t bad enough already (with Tesla arguing that it lies in an attempt to prove that it doesn’t lie)…

Edmunds on September 7 gave an honest and clear negative review of the Tesla “yoke” option for steering control:

…it actually feels dangerous… don’t let anybody tell you this is a good idea, I can’t believe it’s legal.

To be clear, this is a qualified review by a man with experience in a F1 car with a yoke.

He’s an expert telling us the Tesla yoke is a terrible idea, and he ends up guessing it was made only for “Twitter” noise/marketing instead of benefiting actual retail drivers.

Race cars in loops obviously aren’t turned more than slight rotation (it would be disaster at high speeds to turn too far) yet any real world driver has constant arcs over 180 degrees. The F1 has direct steering, whereas indirect steer is more functional for real-world driving.

It kind of begs the question why Tesla didn’t launch their latest attempt to stoke its base with some other fraudulent innovation like installing a “tiller” to steer it like a boat.

Come on Tesla, where’s your tiller upgrade option?

As predicted by the reviewer, despite his very careful explanations and evidence, virulent information warfare tactics over Twitter were unleashed in a stream of personal attacks with attempts to kill him as messenger.

Source: LinkedIn

Consumer Reports then echoed Edmunds’ findings:

Tesla’s New Steering Yoke Shows Little Benefit and Potential Safety Pitfalls

It reminds me of a disastrous flaw in Ford Mustang engineering where they built a rear beam suspension (linked instead of independent) useful only in drag racing, which ended up throwing a lot of owners into a very dangerous spin and crash.

Ford tends to make some pretty big mistakes, yet you don’t see any evidence today of the company organizing social media into highly-targeted warfare against safety advocates.

Edmunds also criticized Tesla’s engineering safety generally in the “Plaid” model calling the car a “marketing exercise to draw attention to an aging car”. And that seems true.

Tesla social media activists then pushed out a petulant “joke” about a new special safety acceleration mode being 60mph in 15 seconds, which honestly doesn’t sound like a bad idea.

Source:JeffTutorials Twitter

Tesla is basically engaging in these information warfare tactics, engaging from a position of insecurity, to have a fan base inflame tension and disruption that discredits experts and science.

To clarify where that “joke” image comes from, JeffTutorials is an obvious Tesla disinformation account:

Source: Twitter

It all reads to me as very similar to that time Edison created an electric chair to kill people and tried to have it called “Westinghoused” (to denigrate a man far superior to him in every way).

How very odd to think that Tesla, a brilliant man who worked for the generous Westinghouse after suffering from Edison’s abusive and inhumane cheats… has his name completely hijacked by a business being run like a modern-day Edison scam.

Energy, Food, History, Security

The 1947 Electric Car That Even Today Looks Modern: Nissan Tama

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I’ve mentioned on this blog before the 1947 Nissan Tama.

It has several important historical characteristics that make it look like something very modern even today.

  • Designed for the switch to a peacetime economy
  • Designed by 200 Tachikawa Aircraft employees
  • Extreme shortage of gasoline
  • Top speed of 35 km/h (22 mph) and a cruising range of 65 km (40 miles) on a single charge
  • Passenger car and truck models
  • Battery compartment in the cabin floor, with two “bomb bay” doors on either side
  • Battery cases on rollers so used batteries could be quickly exchanged with fresh ones

I bring it up again as people lately have been saying they wish they had a quick way to replace their electric car batteries instead of using a gasoline-pump like attachment for slow (complicated and dangerous) charging.

That is what Tama offered in its “bomb bay” like doors and energy swap cases:

Tama power swap used cases of batteries on rollers

Well I guess that means look at 1947 for the answers from war-time aircraft engineers who understood the significance of rapid replacement, refuel turnaround and similar efficiencies.

Of course it wouldn’t happen today for cars without someone over-hyping automation. The Japanese in fact tried outsourcing battery swap to a 2009 Silicon Valley startup, but it arguably died due to massive fraud (*cough* Tesla *cough*) polluting the market.

The Japanese Ministry of Environment has invited Better Place to build a battery exchange station in Japan and engage with the country’s carmakers.

The Chinese notably refer to the brilliant 1940s Japanese model of drive-through EV battery-swapping as being “killed by Tesla years ago”.

That makes it even more tempting to get excited by a Taiwanese company GoGoro as they have slick marketing calling their products “reimagined”.

It’s basically the most distributed and modern take yet on what came so long before the ill-conceived centralized (and often fraudulent — Tesla chargers were dirty diesel engines) “plug-in” market that’s slow, dangerous and bad for batteries.

Source: GoGoro

We’re essentially going back to the beginning, which is good for modern electric vehicles. What would a Tama look like today? Here’s the latest Nissan concept.

Nissan “Hang Out” concept EV, which could be mistaken for having 1947-era battery swap doors.

The most exciting thing about Japanese innovation in stop-and-swap transit models is that any home anywhere could be a supplier. It’s much more attractive and sensible to have someone grab a power pack to go than to hook up to any charger.

If I really think outside the box, literally, then the Nissan car full of batteries can be the swappable battery for a house (like Russian nesting doll batteries). Roll your battery tray into the car and power your car off plugin. Then roll the battery car into the garage and power your house off grid.

Fun fact, since 2013 the Nissan LEAF was engineered to send power (Bidirectional EV as specified in UL 9741), like a giant house battery on wheels.

And even that model goes back centuries.

Imagine hanging a small sign outside your home that says “power cell available”, like the hanging red lamp of the Japanese Izakaya.

…many opted to simply make rice at home and purchase side dishes from outside vendors called niuriya (“simmered foods shops.”).  Around the year 1750, “seated sake shops” and “simmered foods shops” combined into a new business model, the “simmered foods seated sake shop” (niuri izakaya). The cumbersome term would soon be shortened to “izakaya.”

That’s a hint at the universal services and interoperability/pluggable sharing markets that have led everyone for centuries towards putting trust in any modern transport (car), storage (hotel), or processing (restaurant).

Interesting to historians may be how battery replacement goes back even further to an ancient system of caravanserais spaced 20 miles apart on Persian highways, where a tired horse or camel could be quickly refueled or exchanged with a fresh one.

…Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa would have been much more difficult if not for the caravanserais… centers for the exchange of goods and culture…

Thinking of transit engineering problems as new just because some minor aspect of it is new, prevents us from seeing the millennia of knowledge right in front of our eyes. And on that note, information security concepts all are basically derived from transit technology safety practices (transport, store, process).

Poetry, Security

How to Succeed Again After Being Successful

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A 2019 article in The Atlantic reads to me like a whole narrative that is slowing working towards an answer yet never achieving one.

It is kind of ironic.

If you rise towards a single objective there will be a fall, leaving you guessing what’s next… whereas if you continuously improve you may enjoy life-long success instead of feeling it only was in the past:

Entrepreneurs peak and decline earlier, on average. After earning fame and fortune in their 20s, many tech entrepreneurs are in creative decline by age 30. In 2014, the Harvard Business Review reported that founders of enterprises valued at $1 billion or more by venture capitalists tend to cluster in the 20-to-34 age range. Subsequent research has found that the clustering might be slightly later, but all studies in this area have found that the majority of successful start-ups have founders under age 50.

Any single objective is really made up of a large number of rise and fall movements.

So the answer is… how to recover and rise again, a form of adaptation and change.

The less you obsess at achieving a single peak as a life’s objective, the better you might become at climbing every day after you reach it.

I suspect that the Harvard Business Review is stuck measuring narrow factors in their closed-minded study of wealth accumulation. It’s like saying a study has found children under age 4 making rapid improvement in language are in creative decline by the age of 10. Yeah, they move on to other improvements, like math!

What if progress is the goal, instead of perfection of any one step along the way? Are you moving on too fast, too slow? These may be worries ahead, yet at least you’re still moving.