#Tesla Safety Concerns

[selfdrivings]

Why do some people criticize Tesla’s Full Self Driving?

Critics of Tesla’s Full Self Driving often cite the name as misleading, arguing that it implies a higher level of autonomy than what’s actually available. Others are concerned about over-reliance on a system that still requires human supervision.

Additionally, since Tesla bypasses Lidar and high-definition mapping, some experts argue that its approach could compromise safety in edge cases. However, fans argue that Tesla’s data-driven, camera-based model will ultimately be more scalable and adaptable than traditional approaches.

[political-us]

Elon Musk's Tesla is recalling 46,096 of its Cybertruck vehicles over a safety issue relating to a cosmetic panel that could fall off.

About 1 percent of vehicles being recalled are affected by the defect, according to a notice issued Tuesday by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The recall includes all 2024 and 2025 Cybertruck vehicles manufactured from November 13, 2023, to February 27, 2025.

The part issue is another blow for Tesla. The electric carmaker's stock value has dropped significantly in recent weeks, while its vehicles have often been targets for vandalism—seemingly in response to Musk, the company's CEO, taking a prominent role in President Donald Trump's administration.

[firstoccupier]

A Tale of Automotive Hype and Consumer Disillusionment

From GM’s Vega, Chevette, and Corvair to Tesla’s Cybertruck Throughout automotive history, certain vehicles have been launched with great fanfare, only to falter in the face of consumer expectations. General Motors (GM) experienced this with the Chevrolet Vega, Chevette, and Corvair. Similarly, Tesla’s Cybertruck has recently faced scrutiny over unmet promises and production challenges. Despite…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

AI's pogo-stick grift

Hey, German-speakers! Through a very weird set of circumstances, I ended up owning the rights to the German audiobook of my bestselling 2022 cryptocurrency heist technothriller Red Team Blues and now I'm selling DRM-free audio and ebooks, along with the paperback (all in German and English) on a Kickstarter that runs until August 11.

Not only is agentic AI bullshit, but it's a specific kind of bullshit that AI hucksters have busted out in the past, and will bust out in the future, so it's worth spending a minute to unpack this bullshit and catalog its traits so that we don't fall for it. As GW Bush says, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, we don't get fooled again."

Automation can be transformative, relieving us of danger and drudgery by getting a machine to pick up some of the heavy work. Ideally automation seamlessly swaps a human for a machine at some stage in a process (ideally, the boring, dangerous and/or difficult phase). Like, whipping egg-whites for a meringue is hard on your wrist. But swap your whisk for a hand blender, and suddenly that tiresom process becomes fast and easy. If the blender is cordless, you can use it anywhere in your kitchen, including wherever you would have stood over a bowl with a whisk.

A mixer, by contrast, requires more labor on your part: you have to decant the contents of your mixing bowl into the mixer, run its motor, and then scrape the whipped whites back into your bowl for the next phase. It's worse automation.

But the worst automation would be a mixer that requires a special electrical outlet, a different fridge, and a special egg-carton. You would have to redesign your whole kitchen to use that thing. Sure, it might produce perfect meringues, and sure, if you had a meringue factory it might be a great solution. But for everyday use, it's a solution that creates more problems than it solves.

AI pitchmen promise that seamless swapping of a human tethered to some choresome drudgery for software. That's the whole point of self-driving cars: each of us can swap a standard car for one with an autopilot and use the same roads, with the same road-users, to get to all the same places. We don't have to tear up all the roads and lay tracks, or fill the roadside environment with sensors and beacons to help the "self-driving" cars navigate the system. A self-driving car can share the road with human-piloted vehicles, even when those other vehicles are driven by humans who don't see why they should allow a robot to merge into their lane or have the right of way, even if the human is turning left into oncoming robo-traffic.

Self-driving cars are not very good at this stuff, as it turns out. When that became apparent, self-driving car hucksters announced that it was only reasonable for their products to require something of the rest of us. As Andrew Ng put it:

“I think many AV teams could handle a pogo stick user in pedestrian crosswalk,” Ng told me. “Having said that, bouncing on a pogo stick in the middle of a highway would be really dangerous.”

“Rather than building AI to solve the pogo stick problem, we should partner with the government to ask people to be lawful and considerate,” he said. “Safety isn’t just about the quality of the AI technology.”

https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/3/17530232/self-driving-ai-winter-full-autonomy-waymo-tesla-uber

This is an incredible act of shameless bait-and-switchery. In just a few short sentences, Ng's cars go from being the kind of automation that is purely the concern of the person who uses it – the owner of a self-driving car – to the kind of automation that everyone in the world has to adjust to, lest we become part of the "pogo stick problem."

Making a car that can navigate a well-behaved, non-adversarial world is relatively straightforward. But demanding that the entire world behave itself? Well, that's the hard problem of 100,000 years of civilization and ethics. A product that only works in an ideal world isn't a viable product.

Self-driving car boosters didn't invent this wheeze, either. The entire concept of "pedestrian" (and later, "jaywalker") was invented by the auto industry to shift blame for the death and destruction the wealthy owners of their products inflicted on everyday people to the victims:

https://marker.medium.com/the-invention-of-jaywalking-afd48f994c05

The latest peddlers of pogo-stick demands are the agentic AI people. They have raised (hundreds of) billions of dollars by promising that they will make AIs that can autopilot your browser to accomplish tedious, time-consuming tasks, visiting the same websites you would visit, locating and processing the information needed to perform the task you've set for it. This will supposedly make all kinds of human workers obsolete (which is where the hundreds of billions of dollars come in – the whole AI investor pitch is "We are developing technology that will let bosses fire their workers").

But agentic AI sucks. Asking a chatbot to take a screenshot of a website, then make guesses about which parts of it are links and what those links do, choose one link to fire a click at, and then start again is a recipe for incredible dysfunction. That's even before we get into "hallucinations" (this is AI jargon for "errors").

A more mature agentic AI apologetics admits that while no one knows how to make an AI that can navigate the whole internet, we can make specialist agents that can perform one kind of task, then hand off the output from that task to the next agent, and the next. This also sucks: you're created a whole menagerie of AIs, each of which is prone to its own failure modes, and then combining them, multiplying all those error potentials together, sending erroneous findings careening through a cascade of downstream AIs. This is broken-telephone-as-a-service. Give it your credit card, ask it to order a bag of jucing oranges, and six months later someone's gonna back a 16 wheeler up to your front door with $40,000 worth of frozen OJ and a receipt for a futures contract you're on the hook for.

The latest agentic AI pitch "solves" this problem by asserting that the whole internet will simply have to accommodate itself to AI agents. Every website will have to adopt robust, accurate semantics that describe its navigation and offerings, standardized across every domain of human activity. This would be great. The semantic web people have been trying to make it happen since 1999, with no success to speak of, for reasons I identified more than 20 years ago:

https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm

The reason websites don't make their results easy to scrape and compare is that they want to cheat you. They want you to buy something more expensive and/or inferior than the best match for your desire. There is no way for an AI agent to know when a website is lying to it, and the websites that lie the most are incentivized to have the best, highest-grade automation hooks for an AI agent to connect to (just as spammers have the best, most pristine anti-spam incidia, from DKIM to SPF to DMARC records).

And these cheaters aren't fringe players – they're the biggest companies out there. Amazon knows that Prime members don't shop around, so it presents them with higher prices than non-Prime users. Airlines use AI and surveillance data to estimate your desperation and price their tickets accordingly:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/30/efficiency-washing/#medallion-clubbed

What's more, these companies sue people who try to collect and analyze their prices:

https://simpleflying.com/ryanair-wins-case-booking-screen-scraping-reselling-tickets/

The hard part of comparison-shopping for an airline isn't sorting a database of all the prices offered to all customers under all circumstances: it's compiling such a database. We don't need complex AI-based techniques to perform a simple sort – we need AI to solve the problem of knowing what prices every airline is charging at this instant to every flier for every itinerary.

When agentic AI grifters insist that the entire internet has to adopt and faithfully use standard APIs so their bots can accurately analyze the internet's contents, they are re-inventing the pogo-stick problem. Yes, if you could get the entire world to arrange its affairs to your benefit, you could surely do some incredible things, and if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a rollerskate.

Even if you could get everyone to adopt a standard set of APIs and use them well, this is a titanic engineering challenge, at least as big as anything the agentic AI people are promising to do.

There's an unassailable response to the assertion that you could do amazing things as soon as everyone else upends their life to make things more convenient for you, the sacred principle of "wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which will be full first":

https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/oqiic7/studying_the_origins_of_the_phrase_wish_in_one/

Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/02/inventing-the-pedestrian/#three-apis-in-a-trenchcoat

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[allthecanadianpolitics]

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-auto-show-tesla-removed-1.7487191

[saywhat-politics]

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) — Tesla has been removed from participating in this week’s Vancouver International Auto Show over safety concerns, the event’s executive director said Tuesday.

Eric Nicholl said in a statement that the show asked the electric carmaker to withdraw because of a “primary concern” for the safety of workers, attendees and exhibitors.

Nicholl said Tesla was provided “multiple opportunities to voluntarily withdraw.”

“This decision will ensure all attendees can be solely focused on enjoying the many positive elements of the event,” the statement said.

The show at the Vancouver Convention Centre begins Wednesday and will end Sunday.

The automaker’s removal comes after so-called “Tesla Takedown” protests over the weekend, including in Ottawa and Vancouver, that denounced Tesla CEO Elon Musk and his role advising U.S. President Donald Trump, who has infuriated Canadians with talk of making Canada the 51st U.S. state.

[ralfmaximus]

An auto show spokesperson said in a statement to CNN that Tesla was “removed” following “multiple opportunities to voluntarily withdraw” from the event, adding that the show’s “primary concern is the safety of attendees, exhibitors, and staff.”

Organizers are expecting 130K+ visitors so this isn't a small affair.

They're worried about violence, obviously. Protestors, or random folk yelling "Nazi!" at Tesla employees. Or worse, Musk stans throwing Nazi salutes in support of the brand.

Although the idea that Teslas are too dangerous to leave parked at an auto show due to spontaneous combustion is pretty amusing too.

[bioethicists]

it's quite offputting to me when ppl can't disentangle their hatred for capitalism from a hatred for... new technological innovation? the ways in which capitalism has shaped the development of certain technologies has been deeply negative, not to mention that imperialism ensures that new technology is usually produced via extractive relationships with both the planet + ppl in the global south.

but this weird tying of capitalist impact on innovation (+the idea of what is/is not innovation) to hatred of innovation itself (or even more disturbing valorization of "the good old days"/implications that technology is causing social degeneracy) is baffling to me. perhaps it is impossible to achieve specific technologies without unconscionable resource extraction practices, in which case they should not be pursued. but so many ppl act like there is something inherently morally suspect in pursuit of tech such as autonomous vehicles or AI or automation, independent of the material conditions that produced them/that they may produce.

tesla is evil because they exploit ppl for profit + participate in an economy built on the exploitation of the global south + use 'innovation' as a marketing tool to mask serious safety concerns. they're not evil bcuz they want to make vehicles that move on their own. there are actually a great deal of fantastic applications for vehicles which move on their own? equating technology with moral decay is not a radical position; you need a material analysis of why technological innovation has become characterized by harmful practices.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Rolling Stone:

As Elon Musk‘s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) continues to wreak havoc with the internal mechanics of the federal government in its efforts to gut and dissolve vital agencies, the White House is signaling that it has no problem with the richest man on the planet serving as his own ethics watchdog.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt fielded a question about Musk being a special government employee while his various companies have billions in government contracts, and whether the Trump administration was taking steps to curtail the many conflicts of interest that has created. Leavitt replied that the president had already addressed this concern, saying that “if Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that DOGE is overseeing, Elon will excuse himself from those contracts.”

Of course, it’s nearly impossible for Musk to direct any action by DOGE in Washington without potentially affecting one of his businesses. X, formerly Twitter, currently faces a lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange Commission that alleges he withheld information about the stake he was acquiring in the company ahead of his bid to purchase it. The Department of Labor, which could be next on the chopping block for DOGE, has probed and fined Tesla and SpaceX for unsafe working conditions through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Tesla is also under investigation by the Justice Department for possible securities and wire fraud related to its unsupported claims about fully autonomous vehicles.

SpaceX has additionally been fined by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Aviation Administration — and Musk personally pressured the last FAA administrator to resign, leaving the agency leaderless when a commercial passenger jet and U.S. Army helicopter collided in mid-air over the Potomac River in D.C. last week, killing 67 people. (Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on Wednesday that DOGE staff were going to “plug in to help upgrade our aviation system.” Duffy’s department includes the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which has its own ongoing investigation into Tesla’s self-driving features.) The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is suing Tesla over alleged racial harassment at a manufacturing plant, and the National Labor Relations Board has tangled with both Tesla and SpaceX, with the result that Musk’s companies and other corporate behemoths are waging a legal battle to see the agency declared unconstitutional and wiped off the map for good.

[mariacallous]

One of the largest federations of unions and several former officials of the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration have raised concerns about the possibility that Elon Musk and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency could potentially gain access to sensitive information shared with OSHA and the Department of Labor by whistleblowers at the centibillionaire’s companies.

While Musk serves as a “special government employee” in the Trump administration, SpaceX, Tesla, and The Boring Company are the subject of more than 50 ongoing workplace health and safety cases opened by OSHA in the past five years, according to a public database maintained by the agency. OSHA sits within the Department of Labor, where DOGE operatives have been working since at least March 18.

In a memo shared exclusively with WIRED, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), which is currently suing the Trump administration over DOGE’s access to records at the Department of Labor, says they believe that the news reports and OSHA cases in its memo allegedly illustrate “gross mistreatment and even abuse of workers” at Musk companies in five different states. In the memo, the union federation alleges that as Musk attempts to exert “unilateral control” over the federal government through DOGE, “his record as a boss should be of concern to every worker in America.”

Musk, Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, OSHA, and the Department of Labor did not respond to requests for comment.

There’s currently no public evidence to suggest that Musk or DOGE has accessed confidential files at OSHA. But the fact that DOGE has tried to seek access to other potentially sensitive databases at the Department of Labor and a number of other federal agencies worries both the AFL-CIO and former OSHA administrators.

Jordan Barab, former deputy assistant secretary of OSHA under President Barack Obama, tells WIRED that “no company who is being cited by OSHA or investigated by OSHA” should obtain the ability to access the agency’s “internal and confidential files.”

In a March 29 court filing, lawyers representing the Trump administration in the AFL-CIO’s lawsuit said that DOGE operative Marko Elez currently has read access to four record systems at the Department of Labor, including a database for managing employee access to federal buildings and systems, and another for keeping track of unemployment benefit claims. The filing states that Elez “has not accessed any of the systems,” but has installed Python and a tool for editing software code at the agency.

Tesla is currently the subject of one active OSHA investigation, according to the public database, meaning OSHA has yet to issue a citation or dismiss the case. The case was opened last month in response to an unspecified “safety” complaint about a Tesla facility in Lathrop, California.

Since April 2020, OSHA has issued 46 citations to Tesla—for a variety of allegations, including claims of violating OSHA safety regulations, failing workplace inspections, or because a worker was injured at the facility—more than half of which Tesla is currently disputing. During that same time period, OSHA had six investigations that resulted in citations to SpaceX and three to the Boring Company, a tunnel construction company founded by Musk.

In the memo, the AFL-CIO highlights some two dozen accidents and alleged safety issues reported at Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company since 2016 as the basis for its concern, some of which were the subject of recent OSHA investigations. In one incident reported to OSHA last year, a licensed electrician named Victor Joe Gomez Sr. was electrocuted and killed after being instructed to inspect electrical panels at Tesla’s Gigafactory in Austin, Texas, that OSHA determined had not been properly disconnected beforehand. (The case remains open, as Tesla is actively disputing it.)

Two separate OSHA citations at other Tesla factories involved fingertip amputations. At a SpaceX facility in 2022, an employee “suffered a skull fracture and head trauma and was hospitalized in a coma for months,” according to the final OSHA accident report, after experiencing what the agency described as a technical problem with a newly automated piece of machinery. SpaceX did not contest its OSHA citation and $18,475 fine.

Liz Shuler, the president of AFL-CIO, claims that a number of Tesla workers have repeatedly alleged to the federation that safety isn’t prioritized at the car company. The AFL-CIO works with the United Automobile, Aerospace & Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW), but it does not represent employees at Tesla or SpaceX.

“There are clearly some serious safety hazards in their facilities,” Debbie Berkowitz, former chief of staff and a senior adviser at OSHA under Obama, alleges, referring to Tesla.

After OSHA issues a citation, employers have the right to challenge it, and Tesla does this often, according to the agency’s public database. Of the 46 Tesla cases in which OSHA issued citations over the past five years, the memo cites 27 that remain open because the car company is actively disputing them with the agency. Two SpaceX cases and one Boring Company case remain open for the same reason. The cases can’t be closed until both OSHA and the companies agree on the terms of the citation, which may include associated fines and specific changes the company has to make to improve worker safety.

David Michaels, the assistant secretary of labor for OSHA under Obama, tells WIRED that, in general, big companies typically don’t have a financial incentive to challenge OSHA citations, since they usually are accompanied by fines costing only a few thousand dollars. However, a company isn’t required to address the specific hazard that led to an accident until after a case is closed. In order to avoid addressing these alleged problems, Michaels says that generally, some companies may be motivated to keep cases open.

“Some employers decide they don't want to abate the hazard, they don't agree with the citation, and they will spend many, many thousands of dollars fighting the case, and it'll cost them far more than simply paying a small fine and abating the hazard,” Michaels says.

There is currently no evidence that Musk has access to any confidential databases at the Department of Labor that may contain personal information about whistleblowers. But former OSHA administrators say the agency does house records that would anonymize whistleblowers, as well as employees who participated in anonymous interviews with agency investigators.

Berkowitz says her fear is that someone with this amount of access could be able to identify every whistleblower who has contributed to an OSHA investigation into one of his companies. Michaels adds that, generally speaking, there is “a very significant concern” that whistleblowers who have their identities revealed would be subject to retaliation or intimidation.

“If those were released to the employer, workers could suffer retaliation, and while that retaliation is absolutely forbidden by law, it's very difficult for OSHA to protect those workers,” Michaels says.

Shuler tells WIRED that whistleblowers speak out about their companies at great personal risk, and that she is extremely concerned that their anonymity and safety won’t be preserved. “It's, to me, an abomination in terms of the checks and balances that we've put in place into these systems,” Shuler says. “Knowing that our government has trust, that we've been able to get workers to trust that their government will keep them safe, and now we have an unelected billionaire basically disrupting that sense of security.”

Musk has at least twice discussed retaliating against people who leaked information in recent years. In March, Musk said that he would “look forward to the prosecutions” of Pentagon workers after information was leaked to journalists. At X, Musk threatened to sue employees who violated their nondisclosure agreements.

The future of OSHA under the Trump administration more broadly remains unclear. Rebecca Reindel, director of occupational safety and health for the AFL-CIO and a member of OSHA’s National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety & Health since 2022, tells WIRED that the group would have normally met twice already by this point in the year, but no meetings have occurred. Her committee was working on crafting guidelines to prevent heat-related injury and illness in the workplace.

In recent weeks, DOGE has canceled the leases of seventeen OSHA area offices, according to a website where the group lists how much money it claims to have saved the federal government. Neither DOGE nor OSHA have said whether these offices will fully close, downsize, or merge with other existing area offices. At least for now, DOGE doesn’t appear to have orchestrated mass firings at OSHA the way it has at many other federal agencies. “We have not seen massive cuts yet,” Reindel says. “We are expecting them to come.”

[selfdrivings]

Is Tesla Full Self Driving safe?

Tesla’s Full Self Driving has improved significantly over the years, but it's not without its limitations. While many users report smoother commutes and fewer errors, there have also been notable incidents involving misuse or system misjudgments.

Tesla urges users to remain attentive, as FSD is not a substitute for human judgment. With continued development, safety metrics are likely to improve, but regulatory oversight and public scrutiny remain key factors in shaping its future perception.

[steelbluehome]

Apparently when this image and this story is widely distributed, Tesla stick goes down. You know what to do.

Tesla Cybertruck erupted into flames after crashing into a fire hydrant outside a Bass Pro Shop in Harlingen, Texas [x]

"they had extinguished the flames engulfing the Cybertruck. However, the fire reignited after they had stopped the water flow onto the battery, highlighting a challenging concern associated with electric vehicle fires."

"[in a different incident] the blaze's intensity was so severe that it obliterated the vehicle's VIN and left the driver unidentifiable"

"burns at extremely high temperatures, sometimes reaching 2,300 to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, taking hours to extinguish."

" Firefighters have had to adapt their tactics to fight these fires, using full personal protective equipment due to the toxic fumes."

"Tesla vehicles require up to 30,000 to 40,000 gallons of water to put out – approximately 40 times the amount needed for a combustion engine car"

Tesla Cybertruck catches fire after crashing into a fire hydrant The incident highlights the challenges in putting out EV fires By Skye Jacobs August 31, 2024 

Bottom line: Statistical data shows that electric vehicle fires occur at a similar frequency to those in vehicles with internal combustion engines, but this offers little comfort to firefighters. These fires are notoriously difficult to extinguish and pose increased dangers to first responders. At least two fires have resulted from Cybertruck crashes, raising concerns about the safety of high-voltage lithium-ion batteries.

Earlier this week, a Tesla Cybertruck erupted into flames after crashing into a fire hydrant outside a Bass Pro Shop in Harlingen, Texas. The collision resulted in a deluge of water soaking the vehicle's battery, which then ignited, according to Assistant Fire Chief Ruben Balboa of the Harlingen Fire Department. First responders arrived at the scene and believed they had extinguished the flames engulfing the Cybertruck. However, the fire reignited after they had stopped the water flow onto the battery, highlighting a challenging concern associated with electric vehicle fires.

This incident is the second fire in Texas involving a Tesla Cybertruck. The first happened after an owner drove into a ditch. It is the first fatal crash involving the model. In that case, the blaze's intensity was so severe that it obliterated the vehicle's VIN and left the driver unidentifiable.

The Harlingen incident underscores the difficulties these fires pose to first responders attempting to extinguish blazing batteries. Electric vehicle batteries can undergo a process known as thermal runaway, where a failure in one cell generates enough heat and gas to cause a chain reaction in adjacent cells.

The resulting fire burns at extremely high temperatures, sometimes reaching 2,300 to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, taking hours to extinguish. Firefighters have had to adapt their tactics to fight these fires, using full personal protective equipment due to the toxic fumes. New solutions, such as EV fire-specific fire blankets, are also being developed to address these challenges.

Additionally, first responders have found that EV fires demand significantly more water to extinguish. In 2021, Austin Fire Department Division Chief Thayer Smith told Futurism that Tesla vehicles require up to 30,000 to 40,000 gallons of water to put out – approximately 40 times the amount needed for a combustion engine car.

Ironically, Tesla posted a detailed rescue sheet for its Cybertruck the week before the Harlingen fire. Tesla designed the guide to assist first responders by informing them where the vehicle's low and high-voltage power cables terminate.

While such incidents tend to make headlines, it's important to note that electric vehicles generally do not catch fire more frequently than internal combustion engine vehicles. Tesla's global data indicates that, on average, a Tesla vehicle fire occurs once every 130 million miles traveled, significantly less frequent than the average vehicle fire rate of one per 18 million miles traveled in the US.

https://www.techspot.com/news/104515-tesla-cybertruck-ignites-after-crashing-fire-hydrant.html

[cutecipher]

This is how Musk treats engineers that work for him that care about safety, firing them and defaming them

[bossymarmalade]

Elon Musk’s company will no longer be an exhibitor and all references to Tesla have been removed from the show’s website, a move that comes as the billionaire faces backlash for his alliance with President Donald Trump amid a trade war between Canada and the U.S.

“The Vancouver International Auto Show has removed Tesla as a participant in this week’s event, after the automaker was provided multiple opportunities to voluntarily withdraw,” said Eric Nicholl, the show’s executive director, in a statement.

“The Vancouver Auto Show’s primary concern is the safety of attendees, exhibitors, and staff. This decision will ensure all attendees can be solely focused on enjoying the many positive elements of the event.”

[danshive]

The assertion that Full Self-Driving cars are safe because you have to be touching the steering wheel is flawed for three reasons.

The driver is still not experiencing the drive with the car as an extension of themselves, so reaction time is still significantly impaired in the event of an emergency in which the driver must take over.

Lazily having one’s hand resting on the wheel, not even properly held, seems adequate for stopping the “hold the wheel” message. The car also doesn’t seem to do more than display a message (I was told the vehicle will gradually come to a stop, but no videos I’ve seen support this. Maybe that’s true in some cases).

There are easily found videos and guides on how to get rid of “that annoying steering wheel nag.”

I’m not opposed to full self-driving cars if they’re safe, and in any case, I’m not the person anyone needs to convince. I’m a cartoonist. I’m not confiscating anyone’s Tesla.

I just have serious safety concerns, and I don’t like companies being able to put all the blame on “the drivers” when the companies have, at a minimum, shared responsibility.