When San Francisco went from 10,000 Taxis to over 40,000 Uber almost overnight, most of them driving into the city from two or three hours away and sleeping in their cars, clogging all the artery roads like a sudden onset heart disease, it destroyed small businesses and city life.
Fast forward to today and Tesla is threatening Austin, Texas with an even worse fate, literally killing people and polluting the environment to hurt future generations.
Tesla has emerged as a bad neighbor and an even worse employer – polluting the air and water, violating environmental regulations, and endangering workers, some of whom have suffered serious injuries or died on the job.
The death-rate of Tesla software is far higher than domestic terrorism using vehicles, when you look at basic facts.
Austin should see the Tesla version of robotaxis (also announced to start on the Hitler-memed date of 8/8) as a clear and present danger to the security and safety of its residents. Don’t let this serial abuser hide the dangerous truth, since that’s exactly what Tesla is known to do with their robotaxi that Elon Musk has fraudulently announced every year since 2016 as ready for production.
The company routinely conceals hazards from regulators. For example, the Gigafactory uses industrial furnaces that operate at temperatures reaching 1,200 degrees. For months, a furnace door failed to close properly, reports The Wall Street Journal, exposing workers to extreme heat and toxic air, increasing fuel consumption, and releasing higher levels of pollutants from the factory’s smokestack. When a state regulator arrived for an inspection, Tesla employees reportedly staged an “elaborate ruse” to hide the malfunction – temporarily closing the door and lowering fuel input to make conditions appear normal.
Tesla’s environmental violations follow a similar pattern. According to the Journal’s investigation, in 2022 Tesla’s Gigafactory used a 6-acre evaporation pond to contain waste from construction, chemical spills, and the paint shop – which formed a hazardous combination of substances like sulfuric and nitric acids, gave off a foul odor, and even contained a dead deer. For months, Tesla discharged this fluid into Austin’s sewer system without the proper permits or treatment. More recently, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality cited Tesla at least five times since 2021 for violating state standards and on June 4, 2024, Austin Water notified that it had violated its permit by discharging over 9,000 gallons of untreated wastewater into our sewer system.
If you think discharging waste into water is bad, discharging robotaxis into streets will be far, far worse. It’s a killer on the loose already. The Tesla plan literally looks as if America is rolling over and inviting Nazis to deploy tanks into cities to take total control over freedom of movement.
Consider this:
State lawmakers are reviewing a bill that would ban fully driverless trucks in Texas. House Bill 4402…
And compare it to this:
Cruise had about 250 vehicles in Austin and was operating on limited streets during evening hours before it paused driverless operations across its fleet on October 26. Austin collected more than 50 Cruise-related complaints between August and October [such as] robotaxis bricking and blocking traffic and the outright dangerous report of a pedestrian nearly struck while crossing the street. […] [Uber and Lyft collectively paid $2.3 million through 40 lobbyists to block cities from regulating], both of which were pursuing robotaxis at the time, also helped successfully sway legislators to pass a similar bill during that legislative session that prohibited cities from regulating autonomous vehicles. The bill enshrined minimum safety requirements for AVs to be deployed on public roads.
Texas appears to be so coin-operated as to be completely without any moral compass. Truck lobbyists can ban automated vehicles to protect their business, while Big Tech lobbyists can ban any regulation of automated vehicles to protect their business.
Up is down, down is up. Welcome to Orwellian cattle-rustlers running the ranch, in a place called Texas.