Security

Are Tesla Sudden Unintended Acceleration Deaths a Repeat of 1980s Audi 5000 Defects?

Leave a comment

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in 1989 issued it’s bold final report on the Audi 5000 “sudden unintended acceleration problem.”

The NHTSA fully exonerated the German car maker by asserting pedals placed closer together than in other cars caused confusion. It was reasoned (especially models with “cruise control”) that the gas would be pressed mistakenly by Americans instead of the brake.

NHTSA appeared [repeatedly] to embrace Audi’s “driver error” theory

The craziest footnote to the NHTSA appearing to work for Audi was how they falsely alleged victims were midgets on drugs.

…Jeff Miller, deputy administrator for NHTSA, told the Chicago Tribune: “Our society is litigation happy. People tend to point the blame anywhere but at themselves. A person drives a car half stoned and gets in an accident, he still blames the car.”

Even with the NHTSA calling American drivers too short and stupid to drive an Audi it couldn’t overcome the 5000 model being seen as defective. Sales plummeted such that by 1991 a little over 10K were sold.

Fast forward to today, no pun intended, and someone wants you to believe even long-time Tesla drivers can’t figure out how their pedals work — they may as well be pressing a 1986 Audi 5000 gas pedal straight to their death.

According to Florida Highway Patrol troopers, the investigation determined the driver of the [2015] Telsa pressed the gas pedal instead of the brakes causing the vehicle to accelerate.

Tesla again could be found defective by design not least of all because its engineers were supposed to account for such well known risks. The flaccid NHTSA gave Audi the green light to blame its victims, so has that been the only lesson Tesla had learned… even ignoring the infamous Mark Saylor tragedy disproving driver fault? It seems so.

Worse, Tesla defends itself by flagrantly ignoring transparency. They say “we can examine exactly what happened” as if nobody else should; in other words they are not allowing anyone (not even the owner of the car, and thus the real data owner) to do real time independent analysis.

In an age when data is supposed to be more interoperable and standardized, more easily shared at high speed, this car company acts like it is writing encoded secrets to stone tablets that evaporate in sunlight. If they told you what the logs really said… they’d have to kill you too.

Tesla “reports” are about as convincing as Enron saying “we looked at our books and they’re functioning properly”. No wonder they relocated to Texas to avoid accountability.

Security

Sleeping Tesla Driver Crashes Into Parked Truck

Leave a comment

The driver of the Tesla was found on the ground, unable to function properly. Police described him as trying to sleep, after he complained about being very “tired”.

That makes it a slightly different case than just DUI, or the usual claim that Tesla controls are so poorly designed people fatally slam the accelerator when they try to stop.

All signs so far here point to a Tesla owner expecting the dangerous fraud of Tesla “FSD” to completely operate his vehicle (as I warned a week ago).

Since he couldn’t really stand and struggled to crawl into the police car, it also raises the question if someone else put him in the Tesla and pushed the buttons to send him into disaster.

And on that note, his Tesla’s software suicidally drove into the back of a truck parked on the highway shoulder, destroying itself and seriously injuring the truck owner.

“Asleep near wreckage” is yet more evidence of Tesla design failure. Source: TMZ

If that truck had been any heavier and stayed put instead of moving — hadn’t been designed so well with crumple zones — the Tesla owner would surely be dead like the hundreds of others.

Tesla promised it would make the safest car on the road yet instead it has proven the exact opposite with its annual death tolls rapidly increasing.
Source: tesladeaths.com

This is as good a time as any to remind everyone that Nissan’s Leaf EV outsold Tesla through at least 2017 and has delivered the opposite of this chart.

Safety statisticians put the impressive Nissan EV design like this:

Source: IIHS “Death rate” calculator for Nissan Leaf.

The chart means when 1 million US Leafs are driven for a year the IIHS predicts that only 5 of the drivers will die. That’s very low. The IIHS industry average is 36.

In Tesla terms: 200,000 of their cars were on the road in 2017 and 11 people died. That leaves us with an IIHS rate of 5 predicted dead in a Nissan, versus an actual rate of 50 reported dead if we scale to the same number of Tesla (far worse than industry average and not getting any better).

We use tesladeaths.com for this math primarily because it’s a site based on Elon Musk’s braggadocios safety claims, and particularly his request that his cars be measured on total deaths caused.

So be it.

Nissan engineering in fact did so well at safety it had zero crashes — again, that is ZERO — to report into automation regulators.

Nissan, with over 560,000 vehicles on the road using its ”ProPilot Assist,” didn’t have to report any crashes, the company said.

Looking back at Tesla it was responsible for 10 out of 10 fatalities using “driverless”. It’s a car company embroiled in dozens of investigations for deadly design flaws let alone a huge number of unnecessary crashes (273 reported so far to regulators including five fatalities).

A design failure at driver alertness monitoring coupled with a design failure at driver assistance? This crash indicates again Tesla is unsafe by design and its fatalities will scale ever higher unlike other far better engineered cars.

History, Security

Phantom Auto Plows the Future of Cyber War

Leave a comment

Forbes has a very nice feel-good story about augmentation technology developed by Phantom Auto.

It gives three examples of people with different abilities than industrial-age (World War I) physical labor requirements.

…the latest research on WWI based on documentary evidence suggests that British troops sometimes reported that being sent into outdoor killing fields was an improvement over being drafted into the slow, agonizing programmed death of the class-enforced loneliness and toxicity from indoor factory work.

The three allegedly have found gainful work using remote drones to help do the miserable physical work. Remote connection is icing on the cake, as it’s really about virtualization that augments and expands a driver’s logical capacity.

As one of the Forbes examples explained in their own words:

…being inside a vehicle is problematic and yet I still drive vehicles for a living which is amazing, ridiculous, but it works.

Driverless is dead, because so many people foolishly believing accelerationist fraud are now dead, whereas ethical augmented driving very much is in our immediate future.

More to the point, forklifts are barely vehicles. They “raise and lower” and might as well have bionic legs for uneven surfaces.

So we’re talking about robots controlled by people who need almost no physical requirements, like the liberationist wheelchair or bicycle evolved. It spells the end of large carriage (car) and cages designed to protect the humans doing high risk maneuvers.

Phantom Auto raises the spectre of an innocuous water tank engineering project of WWI. That humanitarian angle was literally the origin story of combat “tanks”.

Also we know for many years airborne military and intelligence drone operators have been using exactly the same principles as what Phantom Auto is now bringing to machines on the ground.

What’s most interesting in this story is therefore how Forbes (and presumably the Israeli military intelligence PR wing feeding them) quietly frame future warfare systems as good moves for the differently abled (an asymetric strategy that evaporates massive human physical requirements for conflicts).

Woke tech is where any competent military will be headed, leaving waves of toxic masculinity dead in their trenches.

Energy, History, Security

How Elon Musk Pulls An Enron And Gets Away With It

2 Comments

The big question is why Enron, “the most innovative company in America“, ever got caught and held accountable for the thing Elon does constantly: lie and defraud people.

…Times story carried a quote from the closing arguments of the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Nicholas Porritt: “This case is about whether rules that apply to everybody else should apply to Elon Musk,” he said. On the one hand, sure, yes, that would be nice and good. On the other, it has become so radically implausible to the extent that it’s borderline absurd.

The answer, at least from a jury judging Tesla, was that they didn’t really understand how hateful constant improvisation and disregard for law and order by an American CEO would be a bad thing.

A jury was meant to recognize the harm in obvious crimes like, you know, intentional fraud.

Elon Musk’s own defense was that not everyone became his victim, therefore he couldn’t be held accountable for people he victimized.

Seriously, he said some people didn’t believe his fraud as if that should mean those who did have themselves to blame only. Imagine every bank robber ever saying “but whatabout the safe I didn’t crack” in order to avoid conviction.

Blame the victim didn’t move the jury to want to stop victimization. It reminds me of how hard it can be for rape victims to hold accountable their attackers.

[Laws] won’t be enough unless we change the culture that allows assault to happen in the first place.

And that touches on the thorny problem in American history, its sad record of injustice.

When British corporations in 1740s (e.g. James Oglethorpe, the founder of Georgia), and even their King decades later, started abolishing slavery the Americans revolted to find a way to legalize crime against humanity and keep it their primary source of wealth. President Washington used his lawyer to exploit loopholes and preserve slavery after he was ordered to abolish it.

Washington developed a canny strategy that would protect his property and allow him to avoid public scrutiny. Every six months, the president’s slaves would travel back to Mount Vernon or would journey with Mrs. Washington outside the boundaries of the state. In essence, the Washingtons reset the clock. The president was secretive when writing to his personal secretary Tobias Lear in 1791: “I request that these Sentiments and this advise may be known to none but yourself & Mrs. Washington.”

This racist and cruel “father” of America was selfishly manipulating laws through the late 1700s, according to his better peers. The Revolutionary War was about profit, not freedom; especially about profit derived from raping black women.

And we all know how the American courts treat black women plaintiffs let alone any woman.

What’s so bad about Musk undermining all inherent value to replace it with an arbitrarily controlled dictatorship that cruelly destroys society? And is it any wonder, as if mocking the American court system, his big project was announced as a robotic black woman to serve him?

It’s pretty obvious to anyone with expertise in cars that Tesla is a worthless company, yet experts have zero influence over Wall Street manipulation and related fraud.

History says it’s terrible to allow crimes like Musk’s, the worst because trust is erased by selfish predators, but then who is to say any American jury knows anything about history? (PDF of Killing Hope)

Former Chinese Premier Chou En-lai once observed: “One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory.” It’s probably even worse than he realized. During the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident in Pennsylvania in 1979, a Japanese journalist, Atsuo Kaneko of the Japanese Kyoto News Service, spent several hours interviewing people temporarily housed at a hockey rink—mostly children, pregnant women and young mothers. He discovered that none of them had heard of Hiroshima. Mention of the name drew a blank. And in 1982, a judge in Oakland, California said he was appalled when some 50 prospective jurors for a death-penalty murder trial were questioned and “none of them knew who Hitler was”.

Those who know history are condemned to watch others repeat the worst of it.

Enron executives used fraud to inflate revenues and hide debt. The SEC, credit rating agencies, and investment banks were also accused of negligence—and, in some cases, outright deception—that enabled this massive fraud.

Now we can add jurors to that list, again.

In Musk’s case it seems to be taking a lot longer to convict someone for fraud than others like him. Maybe in the end Enron Musk will be like Ford and use his purchase of media to spread hate speech into every dashboard, even directly backing his loyal follower Adolf Hitler, yet get away with it all.

American autoworkers and their children in 1941 protest Ford for enabling his most infamous follower Adolf Hitler. Source: Wayne State