It’s pretty obvious to even the casual observer that Tesla designs not only are seriously defective and subpar, but that the safety record of the brand has precipitously declined as time goes on.
According to a new lawsuit, obtained by TMZ, Jiyoung Yoon claims her late husband, Jyung Woo Hahn, died when his 2020 Tesla Model 3 malfunctioned, crashed into a tree and burst into flames. […] She claims the Model 3 was defective in design, manufacture, and warning … she says it was not crashworthy, making it “unreasonably dangerous for its designed and intended purposes.”
Her claims sound correct to me.
More and more people die in Tesla crashes just like this lawsuit documents, the fatalities piling up faster than ever. This is quite unlike how other car brands have rolled out (e.g. Nissan LEAF and Chevy Bolt both sold hundreds of thousands of cars with close to zero fatalities).
The simple explanation for the uniqueness of huge Tesla failures is they were “gaming” test scenarios and regulations (e.g. getting an artificial high score in a closed room), while ignoring known critical fundamentals of physics in the real world. And then they refused to improve or react appropriately after deaths started to skyrocket.
A dummy mannequin in a crash test isn’t going to try and locate a hidden emergency handle to simply open the door, for example. And yet Tesla continues to build hidden, almost impossible to use, emergency door handles. In fact, defects are often buried in Tesla’s “closed loop” proprietary service model that prevents transparency and accountability.
Wait, it gets worse… Tesla engineers say they were ordered to NOT FIX known “Autopilot” safety failures, while Telsa lawyers ran a coverup campaign (publicly observed “Autopilot” tragedies were reclassified to private secrets) in order to deny the public knowing about rapidly increasing dangers to anyone in or even around a Tesla.
“Tesla requested redaction of fields of the crash report based on a claim that those fields contained confidential business information,” an NHTSA spokesperson told Insider in a statement. “The Vehicle Safety Act explicitly restricts NHTSA’s ability to release what the companies label as confidential information. Once any company claims confidentiality, NHTSA is legally obligated to treat it as confidential unless/until NHTSA goes through a legal process to deny the claim.”
Tesla cared about getting five stars from an agency they disrespected, covering up defects, and not at all about the hundreds of people soon dying in their hands.
Far too many people have been killed by Tesla management decisions, in other words. This is a repeat of the callousness documented during the Ford Pinto lawsuits. It’s easy to believe today, because we’ve seen it before in America.
Families and friends seem to grieve over the same set of Tesla circumstances (sudden erratic car control loss, trapped in a fire, burned to death while trying to escape): any other late model car brand, engineers would have ensured people had a far higher chance of survival.
Friends and family shouldn’t let anyone they know ride in a Tesla. Don’t wait for a ruling to confirm what the data shows, because many lives already can be saved.
Meanwhile we will have to wait and see how courts catch up to what has been known, given more than a decade of evidence pointing to the gross negligence of Tesla.