If you already know an infamous company is run by a white man from South Africa who grew up wealthy during apartheid (hint: his claims of $100K in debt at an early age are admitting his privilege and leverage, also known as credit)… then you might not be surprised to hear that racism is a well-documented and ongoing problem:

An ex-Tesla employee who worked at the Fremont factory for about two years said in a sworn declaration in the Vaughn case that he had heard the “N-word” used at least 100 times by co-workers and that Black and White employees alike referred to the factory as “the plantation” or “slaveship.”

This sentence in particular calls out Tesla’s denials as lacking credibility:

Arbitrations aren’t usually made public, but Bloomberg News reports that court filings reveal that Rushing found Berry’s allegations more credible than Tesla’s denials.

The courts ruled not only that Tesla has a racism problem, but that management has repeatedly failed to act on it to prevent harm/disaster. There seems to be a learning problem.

In a related story, the people who believed in Tesla’s “autopilot” lies are shocked, so shocked, to find out that they were sold a pack of lies — Tesla cars fail to “learn”, such that multiple owners have been crashing into the same hazards over and over again.

An avid Tesla customer, he has previously owned a 2016 Model S P90D and a 2016 Model X. What’s also concerning is that he noted that “several calls and emails” to Tesla about the latest crash in Yosemite haven’t been returned with much interest from the automaker. He hoped that the repair costs would be covered and a loaner car supplied. With five Teslas crashing in the same spot, there is clearly an issue with the use of the driver-assist tech on this particular road and one can only hope Tesla takes it seriously before another accident occurs.

Five crashed cars into the same exact spot. And Tesla still wants you to believe that its cars are “learning”? What if they aren’t learning at all, but the CEO is learning just how far people will follow his advice to their own demise?

In my presentations since at least 2016 I have repeatedly tried to raise awareness about this class of failure. Simply put, if your Tesla is designed to calculate 2+2=4 a billion times, that doesn’t mean it can do basic geometry right, let alone subtraction.

Don’t be fooled by Tesla’s false marketing. Lots of miles, even lots of cars, doesn’t mean it’s prepared for anything.

And why would an “avid Tesla customer” think repair costs for his crashed car should be covered? That definitely smells like someone has been drinking the clown Kool-Aid.

Does this owner not understand how the Tesla scam works?

Getting Tesla to care about its customers would require some kind of government intervention to protect against… obvious fraud and abuse.

So back to the first point, what if poor engineering quality with disdain for human safety is mixed with uncontrolled racism?

You get a Tesla.

Racism is literally repeating mistakes from the past, an inability to learn.

The car’s “driverless” system, just like the car manufacturer’s management, exhibit this trait of repeatedly failing to get past the same basic collision and harm.

See the similarities?

Being “blind to race” is like being blind while driving.

So is owning a Tesla any different from wearing a blood diamond or an endangered ivory bracelet — being blind to the harms? More to the point what if Tesla is just the reformulation of blood diamond thinking out of South Africa?

A heavy survivor-bias means their corrupted definition of “learning” manifests cruelly in sending children to their death in mines (now naive drivers into traffic and dangerous roads) so that a few elites who never take risk themselves can say they own the nicest things.

Zero accountability.

Zero humanity.

Unfortunately many people seem unable to see the obvious symptoms of failure here, as they instead cook up strange ways to issue apologizes while promoting harm.

Take this quote, for example, from the same article above that concluded bizarrely “one can only hope Tesla takes it seriously before another accident occurs”.

Sometimes the technology does its job admirably, like when a drunk driver passed out behind the wheel and his Tesla successfully brought the car to a stop, averting almost certain disaster.

Why should we expect Tesla take any risk seriously when they have built a profit model on overstating capability and then ignoring predictable disasters?

It reminds me of people saying how lucky blacks in America were to be slaves because emancipation meant being dropped into unfair competition with racist whites who keep all the power, deny blacks healthcare and education, and refuse to pay fair wages.

It is NOT an admirable job if the technology encourages drivers to drink and then fraudulently shift blame to their car. There’s nothing to say disaster would be averted (Tesla data in fact shows more accidents happen in cars that add their “driverless” feature).

It could also have crashed, so perhaps the real story is that this is a case where Tesla didn’t fail as badly as should be expected. Never forget that basic “lane assist” is not real driverless.

When this driver was pulled out of his car by police he tried to argue since the CEO of Tesla says the car drives itself therefore a drunk Tesla driver can’t be charged for actually driving.

Does that sound like Tesla is taking safety seriously to prevent another accident? And perhaps more interestingly, does it sound like whites saying they can’t be blamed for apartheid?

The easily predictable disaster has been a disaster:

…two years before The Vessel opened, architecture critic Audrey Wachs was warning that the waist-height railings around the staircases would fail to prevent deaths: “When you build high, folks will jump.”

Even an “easy solution” came with predictions.

Three suicides in the early 2000s at New York University’s Bobst Library – which originally featured internal open-air balconies – offered both a warning and an easy solution.

This story just gets worse and worse.

Carla Fine, who has spent 40 years writing about and talking to those affected by suicide… lives in Chelsea, eight blocks from The Vessel, says the danger of the structure was obvious from the moment it was unveiled… “I knew what was going to happen… It’s a suicide machine.”

Despite the predictions, despite the easy solution and despite clear warnings… the deaths continued due to alleged negligence.

After the first death at The Vessel in February 2019, Fine raised the matter at a public meeting of the local community board. In March, representatives of the board wrote to Andrew Cantor, senior vice-president of Related, urging the company to install higher safety barriers – but it took no action. Over the next year, Fine wrote repeatedly to Related, as well as to Heatherwick Studios, urging them to take the matter seriously. When the next two suicides happened, she was still waiting for a reply that never came.

The total disregard for others comes through in another element of this story.

[Owner of the suicide machine] claimed that it could use, for promotional purposes, any photo of The Vessel posted online, without awarding royalties or due credit.

The owner said even if people did not lose their life, they were guaranteed to lose their assets.

I’m surprised the owner didn’t announce they could rob people visiting their site since they wouldn’t be needing anything after suicide.

Indeed, after multiple suicides the owner decided it would add a $10 fee to tax people at the bottom before their lives were taken at the top.

“If you want to kill yourself, usually you go ahead and kill yourself. Ten dollars doesn’t make the difference,” Fine says. The fact that Related was about to make a profit from the deaths to which its site was linked is also fairly unpalatable.

The owner also started a requirement for people to only be allowed entry in groups, a truly terrible and tone-deaf attempt to ignore safety experts yet again.

That only made the horror worse, because the boy who jumped yesterday did so in front of his family. The structure’s only purpose was to offer a climb and a view. The problem is that the adjacent shopping mall (no stairs or entry fee required) offers a similar view, and the observation deck 1,000 feet above puts them both to shame.

Does it even have any purpose at this point other than to increase preventable deaths?

And who designed this monstrosity of harm, an immediate folly in the truest sense?

The man responsible for this disaster design, Thomas Heatherwick, has no formal training in architecture. Patronage seems to be how he ended up with the job. His prior work was also shutdown as failure, also with massive losses.

During his tenure as London mayor, Johnson championed Heatherwick’s designs for a garden bridge across the Thames. The project collapsed in August 2017, leaving taxpayers with a bill of £43 million, making it one of the costliest project failures in British political history.

What is he doing now? Perhaps he should be forced to create a monument to the dead of Heatherwick Folly — “suicide machine” — paid out of his own pocket?

Apparently he already has some designs in mind.

Thomas Heatherwick is in discussions with a government minister over plans for a memorial to the victims of the Covid pandemic.

Victims of COVID?!

It seems incredibly cruel to ignore the deaths he allegedly is responsible for, which he easily could have been prevented. Many have pointed out his suspicious lack of response this whole time people are dying from his obvious design failure.

Even more cruel is if he has been thinking about the victims… in terms of another quick enrichment scheme to get a back-room deal to design a memorial elsewhere for something else.

Is Heatherwick thinking he can somehow redeem himself through another suspicious deal because it awkwardly shows he at least acknowledges suffering of someone? Or is it just bald corruption, lacking any more thought than moving along from big failure to bigger failure?