Tesla Owner Gets In Someone Else’s Tesla and Drives Away… Couldn’t Believe It Wasn’t His Car

Let’s be honest. The first problem with this story is that Tesla owners can’t tell apart the Teslas. If you bought a TZero in 2003, or a Tesla in 2013 or 2023 you’d be forgiven for thinking its designers have been the laziest workers in automotive history.

Fun fact: different cars are required to have different license plates. But let’s not go there since we’re talking about Tesla owners who obviously don’t care about details (I mean they wouldn’t have bought a Tesla, eh).

The second problem is that Tesla software allowed owner A to unlock and drive away in owner B’s vehicle. Unlock functionality. That means the app gives the appearance of being a security device based on unique identifiers, which obviously should NEVER have a “collision” for the WRONG car to be unlocked.

It begs basic competence of Tesla engineering and whether someone reading this is about to go to a major airport and single-handedly drive away with any Tesla in the parking lot like Randev.

Randev said he opened the door with his app, got in and even drove off. It wasn’t until he was driving that he realized something wasn’t quite right. “Apparently I found some glitch,” Randev said. When he went to pick up the car, there were two Teslas parked side by side, he explained. […] “I was able to get access, a hold of that person’s car but while I start driving it, I realized there was a crack on the windshield,” he said. So he called his wife to ask why and she did not know. He also noticed his charger was not where he usually had it. [After realizing the problem finally] “I was surprised how I was able to drive someone else’s car, by mistake, for an hour-and-a-half while his car was in his hand,” he added.

He then angrily told his wife to never change the license plate without telling him. Ooops, sorry. I said I wouldn’t go there.

But seriously, this reminds me of an old joke from the country. Alice and Bob can’t tell their sturdy steeds apart so they measure them. Alice discovers her black horse is ten hands tall while Bob says his white horse is eleven hands tall.

The Tesla story goes on to say that the company is so dysfunctional it’s unable to respond to Randev’s concerns about his safety.

Randev said he reached out to Tesla, with the video evidence, but he had some emails bounce back and no one has contacted him so far. Global News also reached out to Tesla multiple times but did not hear back. “The corporate email in North America, it says the mailbox is full,” Randev said.

Talk about lazy. What do Tesla workers even do while they’re not doing their job?

Perhaps Randev should install the Tesla corporate email app and see if it lets him in as administrator? If their mail server is anything like their other “futuristic” BS talk, it probably still has default passwords and zero effort at security.

Related, the type of things Tesla knew when they designed their app:

  • Bad physical entropy: “If you have a car made before 1995 you could be at risk of someone having a twin key to your car.”
  • Bad wireless entropy: “After issues with keyless entry in some vehicles a few years ago, the technology was upgraded [before 2016], making getting into someone else’s car with your remote, pretty hard to do.”
  • Car maker apathy: “Until more concern, publicity and complaints are brought out, this will not be of significant concern for auto manufacturers and they won’t spend the money needed to correct this.”

Tesla is a lazy fraud. Their brand is basically garbage engineering for careless people in a rush who don’t check details.

The Microsoft Ethics Team Was Fired After They Criticized OpenAI

Nothing to see here. Move along.

The move leaves Microsoft without a dedicated team to ensure its AI principles are closely tied to product design at a time when the company is leading the charge to make AI tools available to the mainstream, current and former employees said. …the team has been working to identify risks posed by Microsoft’s adoption of OpenAI’s technology throughout its suite of products. […] The elimination of the ethics and society team came just as the group’s remaining employees had trained their focus on arguably their biggest challenge yet: anticipating what would happen when Microsoft released tools powered by OpenAI to a global audience.

What would happen? Apparently Microsoft would kill the messengers.

German Inability to Accept Guilt and Two World Wars

Two recent works explore a dangerous theme in German history about dealing with guilt.

First, the first World War.

Most Germans refused to accept the blame for starting the war, seeing Germany as having reacted defensively to French and Russian “encirclement” and believed the Kaiser’s deception that he declared war in response to Russian mobilisation. This is what made the famous “war guilt” clause at Versailles, a statement of plain fact, such a bitter a pill to swallow. It was from this starting premise, established in 1914, that many of the other pathological ideas that spread in 1920s and 1930s Germany logically followed.

Second, the second World War.

Schwarz discovered that in 1938, her grandfather, a member of the Nazi Party, exploited anti-Semitic policies and the persecution of Jews to underpay for a business owned by a Jewish family. In later letters to the family’s only survivor, her grandfather refused to pay reparations. “You can see that he’s in total denial of his responsibility as a Mitläufer under the Third Reich,” said Schwarz. “And most of German society, after the war, was in total denial of their responsibility to the point that they considered themselves as victims.”

Russian Software Engineer at Zoox Charged With Bombing Bay Area Power Stations

A man from Russia, living a Bay Area home with three young children, has been arrested by police for building bombs and attacking energy distribution systems.

A software engineer in San Jose has been charged with blowing up two electric transformers in the San Francisco Bay Area, which knocked out power for thousands of residents in December and January. Peter Karasev, 36, was arrested last week and charged with arson, destroying an electrical line, detonating an explosive device, and possessing bomb making materials. Local police found so many explosive devices and materials in his house that they had to call in help from other agencies, including the FBI, DEA, and National Guard.

Police says they have no evidence of motive, yet the suspect’s wife said he wants to cause chaos by attacking infrastructure.

His resume says he has a 2013 PhD in computer engineering from Georgia Tech. He joined Zoox just eight months ago as a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, after working for Toyota as a Senior Software Engineer in Perception (autonomous cars).

It obviously begs the question what kind of chaos he was plotting for Zoox or other autonomous vehicles — perhaps treating them as loitering munitions.

This brings to mind also the German military after 1914 inflicting bombings across America by recruiting “destroying agents”.

Inclosed [sic] is the circular of November 22, 1914, for information and execution upon United States territory. We draw your attention to the possibility of recruiting destroying agents…

On July 22, 1916 German agents exploded a bomb in a San Francisco parade that killed 10 and wounded 40 people. Unfortunately the corrupt President Wilson abused the investigation to persecute his political opponents with false pretense, which allowed Germany to escape scrutiny.

2023 Tesla Steering Wheels Falling Off While Driving Due to Missing Bolts

The manufacturing quality of Tesla has always been sub-par compared with other brands, regularly ranked one of the worst in Consumer Reports reliability surveys. The latest 2023 results are especially concerning.

U.S. auto safety regulators have opened an investigation into Tesla’s Model Y SUV after getting two complaints that the steering wheels can come off while it’s being driven. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says the probe covers an estimated 120,000 vehicles from the 2023 model year. The agency says in both cases the Model Ys were delivered to customers with a missing bolt that holds the wheel to the steering column. A friction fit held the steering wheels on, but they separated when force was exerted while the SUVs were being driven. The agency says in documents posted on its website Wednesday that both incidents happened while the SUVs had low mileage on them.

Brand new cars had bolts missing from their steering wheel. That shouldn’t even be possible, given how logs of bolt torque can be recorded. A missing bolt would be a giant red flag in logs, for a properly operating assembly line. However, the NHTSA report suggests retaining bolts went missing because Tesla does ad hoc repairs to the car after manufacturing and before customer delivery.

Source: CBS News/Twitter

Honestly it’s hard to believe that photo is from a real car. It looks like the level of quality you’d find in a child’s toy.

Let me just reiterate that Tesla manufacturing quality is so bad they repair brand new cars that have never been driven, which actually may reduce safety even more!

Awful.

This comes not very long after the NHTSA posted a recall for Tesla failing to tighten other bolts.

Tesla, Inc. (Tesla) is recalling certain 2022-2023 Model Y vehicles. The bolts securing the second-row seat back frames may not have been securely tightened.

The Tesla recalls are really piling up, as if they’re trying to be more like Ford.

  • Recall: 322K Model 3s and Ys for Faulty Taillights
  • Bulletin: DC Link Busbar Bolts Missing
  • Bulletin: Self-locking Nylon Nut Missing From Front Suspension

That’s a lot of missing bolts. No modern manufacturer should have these issues. Again… logs.

Repairs done ad hoc after a manufacturing process are very troubling for many reasons, not least of all because quality depends on processes in field/port that may be non-existent. The Drive in 2020 gave a scathing example of the kind of ad hoc fixes being hidden by Tesla.

“Tesla Model Y Owners Find Cooling System Cobbled Together With Home Depot-Grade Fake Wood. The world’s most valuable automaker, ladies and gentlemen.” Source: The Drive

The craziest part, pun intended, is that somehow Tesla owners buying into this obvious tyranny didn’t think they would be screwed by its tyrant — scarcity of parts, overpriced service, low quality, slow or no response. The Drive points out the irony that fake wood used by Tesla isn’t in any parts catalog, yet Tesla demands customers use only Tesla parts.

Mind you, this is basically all just hardware. Software recalls have been even worse for Tesla. Phantom braking incidents repeatedly increased after Tesla released worse code meant to help. And here’s a death right after an “OTA” change was pushed on owners:

The Walnut Creek crash happened two days after Tesla issued its latest recall, announcing that 362,758 vehicles equipped with the company’s full-self-driving (FSD) software would have to undergo a software-based, wireless update.

Slamming at high speed into a parked high visibility safety vehicle? Not only is Tesla software worthless, imagine the driver trying to take control only to find the hardware falls apart. It would be a joke if it wasn’t so tragic.


Update March 15: Nissan had almost the exact same issue and the complete opposite response. As soon as a steering wheel bolt issue was identified, they instigated an internal investigation and then issued a recall.

…Nissan only found two Ariyas that had loose steering wheel bolts out of 96 that were audited by dealers up to the point where Nissan decided to launch this recall. At that time, 418 Ariyas were in the U.S., but the recall was due to an “abundance of caution,” according to the NHTSA report. According to that same report, 1,063 Ariyas are subject to this recall with an estimated 1 percent being affected.

Everyone can trust Nissan, as you can see. Sadly it seems even the most devout Tesla owners can not trust their manufacturer, dealer or repair shop.