The 2013 Tesla future-leaning hot-take sales pitches — the promise that rapidly throwing AI into cars magically would solve all dangers of driving — have been declared an official flop. As if we couldn’t already tell by 2016 it would make safety worse, given security analysis of the first Autopilot fatalities.

Mounting safety tragedies including loss of lives were apparently all easily avoidable, related to some dumb engineering mistakes that regulators are still chasing down.

Here comes the NHTSA, uncorked from Tesla’s 2016 government corruption schemes. It no longer ignores the fact that millions of dangerous loitering missiles on public roads are prone to sudden fatal failure.

The resulting software update doesn’t get at the underlying design problem, an inability of the Tesla to recognize and avoid crashing into everything.

Notably, vehicle deaths in America have been rising rapidly, attributed to things like the high-risk low-care false overconfidence and constant distraction or just plain negligence of drivers in a Tesla.

Or as researchers wrote earlier this year, data shows Tesla ADAS increased the rate of crashes while promising to be the solution.

Although Level 2 vehicles were claimed to have a 43% lower crash rate than Level 1 vehicles, their improvement was only 10% after controlling for different rates of freeway driving. Direct comparison with general public driving was impossible due to unclear crash severity thresholds in the manufacturer’s reports, but analysis showed that controlling for driver age would increase reported crash rates by 11%.

No surprise then, that the years late and very low-quality Tesla CyberTruck is predicted to climb towards the worst vehicle safety record in history, a looming danger especially to the most vulnerable populations on public roads.

How To Build a Car That Kills People: Cybertruck Edition. The Cybertruck represents a lot of what’s wrong with the U.S. transportation system — even as it purports to address those problems.