That giant sucking sound in the news is actually just Tesla.

EV sales are trending up, going strong, but if you add Tesla’s bad apples into the bunch they spoil the barrel.

I see this reported over and over again now. EV sales are way up, some even above 50%. Tesla sales are way down the other direction.

It begs the question, if Tesla no longer wants to be called a car because it can’t compete with real cars, why not remove it from the market altogether?

Repeatedly lately I’ve been looking at Tesla “veered” crashes killing people all over the world.

From suddenly leaving a road to drive into trees, to crossing yellow lines into oncoming traffic, to leaving a mountain off a cliff, the Tesla death toll keeps rising. It represents perhaps the worst engineering in history.

Here’s yet another example, where the owner clearly witnesses his FSD unable to safely follow the curve of a road.

And if that’s not bad enough, there is a new video of a Model 3 with FSD Supervised version 12.3.6 that detains its captive passengers in the middle of railroad tracks… as if the Tesla robot has been training to be a sad cartoonish silent movie villain.

That was absolutely terrible. It did not see the stop sign until the last second and then it slammed on the brakes in the middle of the train tracks. And just sat there. It would not go until I hit the accelerator.

Later in the same video FSD stops at a yield sign with no traffic anywhere in sight, refusing to move. When it finally is forced by the driver to roll again, it claims the legal speed limit is 5 mph and only crawls along an empty road in the countryside.

Driverless cars and all that jazz about AI seems to be having none of the promised “safety” effects, as more people are being killed than ever, especially pedestrians who are non-white.

Here’s the latest from Smart Growth America’s report “Dangerous by Design 2024“.

A historic increase in these deaths from 2020 to 2021 shocked many, but this epidemic continues to get worse. In 2022, the most recent year with complete federal data, the number of people who were struck and killed while walking grew to 7,522, marking a 40-year high.

This represents an astonishing 75 percent increase in these deaths since 2010. Danger outside of a vehicle is getting consistently worse: The share of all traffic deaths that were people outside of vehicles hit the highest share in 40 years. Those 7,522 deaths are roughly the equivalent of the population of a small town like Buena Vista, Colorado, the student population of Gonzaga University, or more than three Boeing 737s full of people falling from the sky every month for a year. 61,459 people walking were struck and killed in the last decade from 2013-2022, compared to 45,935 in the previous decade from 2003–2012. 61,459 people killed over the last decade is a shocking number. Each one of these deaths was a person who left behind a grieving family and friends.

The proportionality of the risk related to economic status, and therefore historic racism and discrimination, really stands out.

Dangerous by Design 2024 finds that 7,522 people were struck and killed while walking in 2022, an average of more than 20 per day. As in previous years, we found that not everyone lives and walks with the same risk. Black and Native Americans, older adults, and people walking in low-income communities die at higher rates and face higher levels of risk compared to all Americans

There’s something not quite right about this story. 10,000 tickets were issued by a robot in the first two weeks of being setup, with nothing to suggest there will be a slow down.

With so many violations, [Morrison Police Chief Bill] Vinelli said the town had to jump to a higher data plan to store all the tickets. […] Each ticket is $40, meaning the camera brought in more than $400,000 during that two-week period.

They issued so many tickets they ran out of storage.

Hint: if enough people refuse to pay these robotic tickets, as an act of civil disobedience, the cost of operating the system will cause it to fail.

So what’s the point of this extremely excessive revenue generation system targeting outsiders?

The cameras are setup to issue tickets to people leaving town. So it’s a tax on city people? A tax on people who live somewhere else, like an amusement park ticket?

This doesn’t even sound like a 25 mph street, given that more than 10,000 cars in two weeks have driven through… like the throughput of a highway.

Can’t we just call it a toll road?

A toll road was constructed up Mount Vernon Canyon passing through the town of Mount Vernon. In 1880 the road was purchased by Jefferson County and opened up for free travel.

Fast forward to today:

The town’s not doing it to make money…

Prove it.

More than 90% of police activity is issuing speeding tickets.

Why not raise the speed limit? Has the town, for example, considered why there are so many cars and how to avoid issuing tickets or get rid of the traffic?

In 2021 a Morrison Police Chief was forced to resign when ticket revenue dipped.

The system reads to me like it’s sucking money without a reason.

Maybe if the money made were used to build a train so there’s no need for cars, then we could see the reason? What will the town make with the money if not doing it for the money?

Taking a look at Morrison demographics, it has a population of 400 people and 93% white. What’s the demographic data on the people they are taxing?

Related: Speed camera tickets don’t have to be paid if there was a “dead man driving“.

Also related: “Increased crashes where traffic cameras are posted”

And finally, related: “The $180K grant in 1966 to develop automated license plate readers.“