Despite the extensive promotional efforts by a certain car company regarding its “sensor” and “vision” technology aimed at enhancing transit, Tesla consistently demonstrates its failure to live up to these claims, emerging as a notable outlier on roads worldwide.

News from Edinburgh: Tesla blocking a bus. Tesla blocking a road. Tesla forcing unnecessary waste and expense.

Edinburgh locals have branded a Tesla driver ‘inconsiderate’ after the motorist’s parking reportedly resulted in a road closure on Sunday morning.

Bavelaw Road was forced to close at around 11.30am due to the route being blocked by parked vehicles. One Tesla driver in particular caused a frenzy after their parking blocked a service 44 bus from passing through.

The Tesla brand is characterized by its assertiveness, self-centeredness, and negative influence, primarily attracting consumers who envision themselves achieving rapid social advancement through acquiring some flashy product that often catches on fire. This analogy likens the experience to an individual smoking premium cigarettes on a bus, disregarding others’ comfort and obstructing the doorway.

Bus passengers asked rather than told not to smoke – archive, 1964

1964 seems like forever ago. And yet we’re still at the early point of asking people not to drive a Tesla like a jerk, instead of telling them not to drive one at all.

Remember how controversial it has been in the past to challenge selfish harmful behavior?

‘If I can’t smoke on the bus, I’ll walk’ – how smoking was banned on Dublin Bus 30 years ago.

Then walk. Get some fresh air and some exercise. Stop blowing cancer onto other people. Everybody wins.

Instead of merely encountering a single individual causing a minor disturbance by smoking on a bus, Tesla’s encouragement of disengagement from reality enables the most disruptive individuals to wield far more significant influence, potentially leading to severe consequences such as road blockages and a concerning escalation in accidents and fatalities, as documented on Tesladeaths.com.

Get the Tesla away from the buses. Get the Tesla away from the roads. Aggressive transit fraud tactics, especially wielded with such predictably anti-social consequences, deserve a ban. Without fraud there would be no Tesla.

The NHTSA last July opened a preliminary investigation (PE 23-014) given just a dozen complaints.

The Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) is opening a Preliminary Evaluation (PE) on 2023 model year Tesla Model 3 and Model Y vehicles due to reports of inability to steer the vehicle and the loss of power steering. ODI has received twelve complaints alleging loss of steering control and power steering in 2023 Tesla Model 3 and Model Y vehicles. Five reports indicate an inability to steer the vehicle. Seven additional reports cite loss of power steering resulting in increased effort to control the vehicle. A PE has been opened to assess the scope, frequency, manufacturing processes, and severity associated with this condition. The ODI reports cited above can be viewed at http://www.nhtsa.gov under the NHTSA ID Numbers: 11517974, 11519678, 11520582, 11520831, 11525275, 11526827, 11526869, 11527644, 11527716, 11530026, 11532523, 11533252.

The Register read through the complaints back then and offered highlights such as this one:

Car steering felt stuck and slid off the road which resulted in crashing into a tree,” the Model 3 owner reported. “Tesla features did not help stay in the lane or break in an emergency

“Tesla features did not help…” kind of says it all. The steering feature certainly didn’t help.

Fast forward to today and a “Steering Assist Reduced” and “loss of steering control” and “UI_a020” problem has blown way up to over 2,300 complaints and seems to be climbing fast. Literally thousands of people are describing a major hardware failure (1044832-00-A or 1188832-00-A) that makes their brand new car completely unsteerable.

Here’s a sampling:

[11557546] Steering system malfunction and failure: I have a brand new tesla model y for less than 3 months. Two months after I have the vehicle, the steering rack had an internal fault. The steering rack was replaced at the tesla authorized repair shop. Eighteen days after that repair. I was involved in a car accident. The reason was because my car had veered to the right on its own while driving on a city street. I then turned the steering wheel to the left, but the car did not turn to the left. My car then hit another vehicle…

[11551248] We were turning onto a crowded street, and halfway through turning the power steering suddenly failed. We couldn’t get the steering wheel to move. We were facing perpendicular to the street and several cars were within inches of hitting us.

[11548563] Upon starting the vehicle, the center console displayed a fault code “ui_a020” and a message that steering assistance was disabled. …the tech I spoke with mentioned they have had recent reports of faulty steering racks. They replaced the entire steering rack… this vehicle was only a few weeks old at the time of the incident.

[11546398] I lost all power in my steering and was completely unable to steer. I contacted tesla who advised me to conduct a soft reboot… I refused to drive the vehicle, as I did not feel safe to do so. Tesla sent a tow truck to pickup the vehicle and drop off at a tesla service station. After 3 days, I was informed there was a malfunction in the vehicles steering rack and the entire part will be replaced. I conducted research and found a lot of owners are experiencing the same issue with 2023 tesla y, some even having crashes as a result. This is very unsafe and needs to be addressed.

As you can see, owners are very concerned that the 2023 Tesla manufacturing process has been generating hundreds of thousands of cars that can’t steer. I mean, read the sheer terror and fear in these complaints, mixed with the fact that they willingly paid a lot money for a known garbage brand that fails at everything related to common sense and safety. Naturally the NHTSA has had to upgrade their investigation to help the victims of Tesla fraud.

[11538099] Steering wheel locked up while driving under normal conditions at 45 mph. I was exiting the highway at this time and was luckily able to come to a complete stop. The car had to be towed to the tesla service center. This is a brand new 2023 tesla y purchased a month ago. The steering wheel has been locking up from time to time; and the steering of the vehicle sometimes feels unwieldy, uncontrollable, and simply undrivable. The issue is very dangerous. I googled the issue and came across reddit posts and other tesla forums where other tesla drivers have reported the same issue. There are also youtube videos that discuss the same issue. This seems to be a common enough problem that warrants a total recall. The tesla service agent acknowledged that the problem seems routine and pervasive, but downplayed the issue.

Yeah, maybe googling the issue and reading reddit posts and all those other tesla forums and watching youtube videos should have STOPPED YOU FROM BUYING A TESLA?

WTAF people. Don’t buy a Tesla. Don’t let friends or family buy a Tesla. Come on. The complaints sometimes read like “how is Tesla still in business” being written by the people who gave money to Tesla.

Few things demonstrate that hype about safety “vision” has been a fraud like the car driving straight into a wall.

A Tesla crashed through a brick wall, and the driver attributed it to the road being excessively dark, sparking discussions among netizens. […] Contrary to the claim of darkness by the driver, pictures accompanying the post showed a well-lit road illuminated by street lamps.

Even if a road is dark, a car should be able to illuminate a brick wall with its own lights. The obviously false advertised capabilities of a sensor-based “Automatic Emergency Braking” system unfortunately are the bigger story here.

Police have reported two motorcycles just suddenly crashed into the back of a Tesla.

Police said the two motorcycles collided into the rear of a Tesla driving southbound on NW Broad Street around 5 p.m.

According to police, one of the motorcycles caught fire after the wreck.

Imagine the kind of software design flaw that would cause hard sudden deceleration on a public road able to burst a motorcycle into fire and kill the rider. It sounds like additional evidence for a problem that has been documented for many years (phantom braking), including a horribly botched recall.

Tesla quickly rolled out an over-the-air update to address the issue, yet, since that recall reports of phantom or unintended braking are higher than ever. In fact, the single highest reported cases of phantom braking analyzed by the Post occurred just one month after the recall.

Tesla has been making the world measurably worse as they dump more and more unsafe code into production, getting people killed unnecessarily.

My 2020 autopilot was flawless. My 2021 was flawless for a year or so. Now [in November 2023] I never use it because it’s too dangerous on highways for the risk of it hard braking in front of other vehicles.

Here’s a post from two days ago on Reddit, a place where Tesla owners often discuss the dangers of being allowed to operate on public roads.

@No-Platypus6603: I was in the middle lane doing 69 mph when all of a sudden it happened. I went from cruising at 69mph to less than 30 mph on the highway with not a single car even in my view.

[…] @skreetcode: Last time I was on the highway I had something similar happen.

[…] @gunot290: Happened to me last night actually

[…] @phybzu: A week a go I drove on a highway on cruise control… and my car slammed the break at 75mph. No one was close behind me, so luckily nothing happened

[…] @Tempura_Shelter: The first time it happened to me… hammered the brakes.

Again, these are all Tesla owners grousing just in the past two days about phantom braking being a very real danger to everyone around. Not an isolated or rare problem. Not a theoretical risk to life.

Some Tesla owners in the past two months warned the problem has been getting worse.

Has anyone else had more phantom braking events since these last few software updates occurred? About 3 weeks ago I went on a road trip from San Diego to Lake Havasu and phantom braking occurred probably 4 times when there was not many cars in front of me on the barren roads. The worst happened to me this past Wednesday. I was on the freeway using autosteer and phantom braking took my car from 75MPH to around 50 MPH although there was no cars near me or trying to merge unexpectedly. I’m scared to use autopilot anymore because this last one almost caused me to get rear-ended for no actual reason.

The problem with unpredictable unsafe braking is so bad, as one Reddit user put it a month ago in another thread, owners must live with an expectation their car at high speed will fail catastrophically any minute.

Tesla is the only car i have ever owned where i hover my foot over the accelerator more then the break when using any type of cruise control

Keep your eyes on the rear-view mirror the whole time and your foot over the accelerator pedal or that Tesla software you paid so much money for… proves to be the worst engineering possible, more likely than ever to kill the people behind you.

Related: A class action lawsuit after Nissan “sensors allegedly cause the forward emergency braking to malfunction”.