A total loss! No explanation!

Here’s a sobering fact. The most frequent cause of combustion engine fires consistently has been… electrical systems. We’ve known this forever.

Anyone saying “but combustion fires” should be made aware they are still talking about electrical systems.

It’s thus obvious to any reasonable engineer that a rushed EV market would inherit known electrical fire risk and need to improve necessary safeguards or experience a predictable disaster.

This is the recurring theme of Tesla owners, year after year, month after month, and now day after day. Not Chevy, not Nissan, not Subaru, not Mercedes, not Hyundai… the list goes on and on. And then there’s the obvious exception known as Tesla.

Why does anyone buy a Tesla? Are they just to die for?

It’s perhaps like asking why anyone casts a vote for the very angry man who promises a special safe zone just for you! I mean it’s like asking why anyone believes a fat wolf’s lie that piggies who leave the solid engineering of a brick house for a new straw hut won’t experience sudden “unexplained” fires.

On Sunday, 5 January, around 7 p.m., the firefighters intervened in the car park of the Intermarché in Pontarlier for an electric car. Parked at a Tesla charger, without a passenger on board, a Tesla caught fire for as yet unknown reasons.

Unknown reasons? Did the Pinto have design flaws? The reasons are known. It’s a Tesla.

Tesla fires stay in headlines over and over again because of regular failures in the company’s most basic safety engineering. This is not really about risk from EV ownership, or even cars, it’s about a failure of the market to stop a company that wouldn’t exist without fraud.

Related yesterday news: Scotland Tesla Suddenly Engulfed in Fire

Very little detail released so far about this head-on crash.

Virginia L. Schueman, 64, of Shepherdsville, Kentucky, was a passenger in a 2023 Tesla Model 3 that collided head-on with a 2019 Honda Accord around 9:20 a.m. Thursday on Alabama State Route 55 near the 47-mile marker, said Alabama Law Enforcement Agency Senior Trooper Kendra McKinney.

It still amazes me how anyone can be surprised to find out that without fraud, there would be no Tesla.

Lyu, the founder and CEO of artificial intelligence gadget startup Rabbit, was on the 15-minute drive from his apartment to his office in downtown Santa Monica. He’d turned on his car’s self-driving features, called Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (Supervised), after pulling out of his parking garage. The pay-to-add features are meant to drive the Tesla with “minimal driver intervention,” steering, stopping and accelerating on highways and even in city traffic, according to Tesla’s website. Lyu was cruising along, resting his arms on the steering wheel but letting the car direct itself, he said in a video interview Friday.

Then, Lyu’s day took a turn for the worse. At a stoplight, his Tesla turned left onto Colorado Avenue, but it missed the lane for cars. Instead, it plunged onto a street-grade light rail track between the road’s vehicle traffic lanes, paved but meant solely for trains on LA’s Metro E Line. He couldn’t just move over — a low concrete barrier separates the lanes, and a fence stands on the other side.

“It’s just f—king crazy,” he said, narrating a video he posted to X of the incident. “I’ve got nowhere to go. And, you can tell from behind … the train’s right here.” (He pointed to the oncoming train, stopped about a block behind his car.)

What’s f-king crazy is that any “CEO of artificial intelligence” would step into a Tesla. The Tesla fraudulent promise of using AI to become the safest car on the road has instead turned out to be a mass casualty and death machine. How is this huge elephant in the AI room still a surprise?

Waymo apparently had a software bug that turned their driverless taxi into an unamusement ride, rapidly driving a passenger around in a circle with no way to stop or get out.

“I got a flight to catch. Why is this thing going in a circle? I’m getting dizzy,” passenger Mike Johns said in the video posted in December 2024.

“It’s circling around a parking lot. I got my seatbelt on. I can’t get out the car. Has this been hacked? What’s going on? I feel like I’m in the movies,” Johns told the customer support representative.

The representative asked Johns to open his Waymo app. Johns then asked her to take over the car, saying, “Can’t you just do it? You should be able to handle it.”

She said naturally “I’m sorry Mike, I’m afraid I can’t do that” and spooky horror music began to play.

But seriously, of course the real story here is if they can turn off this unwanted feature with a remote update they can… TURN IT BACK ON!

When you get in a driverless taxi be prepared never to get out again.

Why? Because computer engineers aren’t required to sign a code of ethics. That’s true. They aren’t like other engineers. If they were, for example, Tesla would immediately go out of business.