Porsche owners have poured toxins into the air for decades, with little to no liability to those harmed.

Now a groundbreaking enforcement of pollution laws seems to be honing in on noise, rather than the other forms of pollution.

Fitted with sensitive microphones, the $35,000 cameras detect and capture everything from loud exhausts and backfires to honking and blasting music. Eighty-five decibels is the threshold for receiving a fine, which starts at $800 for a first offense and rises to $2,500 for repeat offenders. For reference, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention places the average environmental noise level of city traffic inside a car at 85 decibels, indicating that City officials are targeting those who go above and beyond a normative sound level.

…[a Porsche driver thus caught making noise] was initially puzzled by the violation. Sure, he admits to hitting 35 mph in a 25 mph zone, but he wasn’t speeding excessively or wringing out the rear-mounted engine, either.

What? He thought 35 in a 25 wasn’t excessive?

Where do these people learn math? Driving 10 mph over in a 25 mph urban area is the definition of excessive.

In urban areas, driving merely 3 km/h (2 mph) or faster above the posted or implied speed limit is considered a punishable infraction…

No wonder he was puzzled why his excessive noise making was ruled excessive. This guy doesn’t care about what’s at stake when he speeds and pollutes excessively, begging laws to be enforced to protect society from such criminal acts.

And then, perhaps to nobody’s surprise, this “belief-based” anti-science guy aggressively tried in court over and over again to prove Porsche designed noise pollution as “stock” just so owners like him could cheat and get away with it.

Instead his protests have ended up proving the opposite, Porsche is failing tests every time in court for good, albeit not broad enough, safety reasons.

Specifically, research shows that prolonged sleep disruption, hearing loss, hypertension, and heart disease are all linked to consistent noise pollution. Additionally, the impacts of noise are specifically detrimental to children, yielding decreased memory, struggling reading skills, and lower test scores when consistently exposed to high levels of noise. With noise monitored by New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene as well as 311 noise complaint data, the top sonic offenders in NYC are unsurprisingly traffic…

Fun fact?

Noise pollution monitoring is far safer politically to enforce than other pollution forms because… the biggest polluters (e.g. utilities like gas companies) aggressively shut down any attempts to measure their crimes.

It’s a wonder VW was caught cheating on American air pollution laws, while Exxon, Tesla, GM and Ford were not, for example. Tesla in particular lit up horribly toxic diesel pollution centers on purpose to troll regulators after VW had been caught, and I’ll bet you never even heard about it.

So this story is really about German car companies having little to no American political clout to defeat public interest safety laws that keep cities safe from known dangers.

It’s not that if he drove a Ford he would have been granted a loophole to harm, it’s that he isn’t getting any support from Porsche because they know how badly this fight to do harm ends for them.

Remember 10 years ago how Germany tried to weigh in on this noise issue internationally?

Future Porsche sports cars could get away with being almost four times noisier than regular cars while high performance versions of the BMW 3 series, Audi A4 and Mini Cooper could become almost twice as loud under German plans for weak international limits on vehicle noise. […] Transport noise is linked to 50,000 fatal heart attacks every year and 200,000 cases of cardio-vascular disease in the EU. […] At full throttle, sports cars could get away emitting over 100 decibels, equivalent to a pneumatic drill.

Well then, German car companies seem to have been headed into their infamous Diesel-Gate fiasco believing at that time they could get away with anything — that all forms of intentional pollution would be good for their brand.

Indeed, noise-polluting Porsche cheats read almost exactly like the diesel-polluting VW cheat designs.

Police chief Dieter Schäfer snitched to the authorities at the Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt (KBA), the agency responsible for certifying that vehicles comply with regulations, about the noise made by cars with sport exhaust modes. Referring to exhaust flaps, which keep performance cars quiet and in compliance with noise regulations at moderate loads but open up when drivers step on the throttle or select a performance driving mode, the police chief said, “We can’t have something certified that makes a large amount of noise in real life.”

Ah, how times have changed. Today it seems clear that American cities would be well within reason to continue to chase Porsche execs under the famous VW precedent, regarding a brand willfully attempting to violate pollution regulation.

Let’s hope this guy exposing the willful fraud of Porsche cheat-to-harm culture is going to bring them to bear in ways that will save thousands of lives or more.

Rumors of the German A-N.T. death are false. But seriously, the A-N.T. Cargo:4 electric bike is the best urban hauling machine you’ve got to ride to believe.

It can carry an unbelievable 800 pounds of capacity silently and cleanly on the narrowest of lanes with ease.

Why even own a truck for carpentry, plumbing, electric anymore? The A-N.T. is the best delivery, renovation and construction vehicle I’ve ever seen, let alone rural community, forestry and agricultural development.

Imagine your farmers market being a circle of these with awnings and a desk unfolded from the side. Clean, efficient and easy.

I never, ever understood the hydrogen car crowd. The fantasy of building a giant sprawling hydrogen generation and supply infrastructure, another horribly centralized yet unstable model of high risk energy, seemed totally nuts. Here are a couple of my old blog posts, if you see what I mean.

• September 2006: The Danger of a Fuel Cell Infrastructure
• October 2006: Problems of Hydrogen Distribution
• November 2006: Will the Hydrogen Farce be With You?

Perhaps they could rename hydrogen-based combustion engines as “farcicles”…so we can go riding on a farcicle built for four.

Fast forward to today, and Shell is abruptly killing the hydrogen dream.

Shell to permanently close all of its hydrogen refuelling stations for cars in California … Shell had last September told Hydrogen Insight that it had “discontinued its plan to build and operate additional light-duty vehicle fueling stations in California”, effectively scrapping the 48 new sites it had previously announced it would build.

Picture this: Shell accepting $40.6 million in grant money from California, only to close operations shortly thereafter. It seems like Shell accepted the funds as a gesture to politicians who expect now to be receiving that money back from Shell for upcoming elections.

The flow reflects hydrogen serving mainly as a politically corrupt system. Climate attention and energy resources are unjustly diverted by wealthy incumbents into scams (e.g. toxic hydrogen, broken hyperloop, dead Tesla-tunnels) in order to deny practical and secure initiatives.

What a farcicle.

Perhaps ironically there is a buried lede in this long running disaster. Smaller engineering fraud stories are bubbling up within the larger hydrogen supply-chain management fiasco.

“Fraud, false promises, concealment”. Iwatani files lawsuit against Nel over faulty hydrogen refueling stations.

Who could have seen it coming? Who?

This post really should have been titled:

“GAS STATIONS SUCK: AMERICANS CRAVE RANGE TO AVOID THEM“.

It’s true. American car drivers travel less than 50 miles a whopping 98% of the time, yet that somehow is falsely interpreted by pundits as a worry about having long range.

The fixation on mileage may be misplaced, however, given Americans don’t actually tend to go all that far when they get behind the wheel. A 2022 study from the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics showed more than half of all daily trips – by any mode of transportation – were fewer than 3 miles (4.8km). In fact, only 2% were longer than 50 miles (80.4km).

What’s really going on? Americans absolutely hate being in or having to deal with a gas station.

Internet service providers ranked second-lowest on a list of 43 consumer industries, outperforming only gas stations.

The misery of pumping gas, due to private yet centrally planned and controlled fuel distribution spots, has created an expectation of “range” to stay away from dealing with the gas service providers more than any actual need for travel distance.

I’ll say it again, American “range” anxiety is entirely because gas stations suck. It has almost nothing to do with driving far, or even dreaming about some long range destination, it’s “how long before I’m back in gas station hell”.

Meanwhile, quality of life actually improves if the act of stopping at places people like to spend time also means their car is refueled, such as having nice lunch, visiting with others, taking a view or a nap. It’s like a horse being fed and watered when the rider dismounts at any destination. Natural, sensible.

The EV should have been able to target the gas station anxiety (capitalize on the inversion of models) to promote distributed, decentralized charging (refuel anywhere, anytime, from anything) as true freedom. Alas, Tesla stepped in and ruined the conversation with dumb “range” propaganda that falsely promoted itself instead.

The simple fact that Americans travel such short distances in their car ironically is the reason why grossly deceptive Tesla range fraud wasn’t exposed and discussed more widely early in its existence.

Tesla is facing a class-action lawsuit filed by customers who say they were misled by the company’s exaggerated range claims. The lawsuit was filed yesterday, days after a report revealed that Tesla exaggerated its electric vehicles’ range so much that many drivers thought their cars were broken.

Falsely advertising 300 mile range fantasies while delivering half that or less in reality, hasn’t hit Americans hard because so rarely did they actually drive far distances. They did complain however about their Tesla dashboard software, designed to lie, engineered for zero integrity.

Tesla employees had been instructed to thwart any customers complaining about poor driving range from bringing their vehicles in for service. Last summer, the company quietly created a “Diversion Team” in Las Vegas to cancel as many range-related appointments as possible.

The disaster was self-inflicted, as a Lance Armstrong level of carefully created evil, where fake victories were celebrated as a “net” improvement. Elon Musk arrogantly gambled that nobody ever would hold Tesla accountable for cheating.

The directive to present the optimistic range estimates came from Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk, this person said. “Elon wanted to show good range numbers when fully charged,” the person said, adding: “When you buy a car off the lot seeing 350-mile, 400-mile range, it makes you feel good.” […] Driving range is among the most important factors in consumer decisions on which electric car to buy, or whether to buy one at all. So-called range anxiety – the fear of running out of power before reaching a charger – has been a primary obstacle to boosting electric-vehicle sales.

There you have it. Elon Musk inflamed unfounded anxiety and false fears in order to aggressively proclaim he was the only one who could save people from short range when that was NOT the actual anxiety.

This bait and switch certainly impacted better engineered cars like the Nissan LEAF, which had been the best selling battery electric vehicle into 2019 with an honest range about the same as the actual Tesla range… again, about half of the fake range Elon Musk advertised.

It’s a notorious fascist strategy to artificially corner people using fear into becoming radical “believers”, a tactic very harmful to any market. Not only is Tesla undermining fair commerce with their overt swindles (stealing real business to replace it with fraud), more generally they completely disrespect law and order with highly planned deception.

Now, in some obviously related news today:

The founder of an electric truck start-up that was popular in the US has been sentenced to four years in prison.

Trevor Milton, who led Nikola Corporation, was convicted of fraud last year after a jury found he had lied persistently about the company.

[…]

“Over the course of many months, you used your considerable social media skills to tout your company in ways that were materially false,” said Judge Edgardo Ramos.

“What you said over and over on different media outlets was wrong,” the judge added.

It is hard to believe Elon Musk wasn’t thrown in jail for the exact same fraud by 2019. Hundreds of people are dead unnecessarily, the blood on his hands far worse than any other car company. Why are the egregious crimes of Musk so slow to be prosecuted, leaving so many dead, yet his philosophical peers like Milton, Holmes, and Bankman-Fried already are being locked up?