Tuesday, January 25, 2022

Elon Musk, Threat or Menace Part 2

Last April I wrote Elon Musk: Threat or Menace? flagging three of his externalities; the carbon footprint of his infatuation with cryptocurrencies, the environmental impact and cost of his infatuation with colonizing Mars, and the threat his infatuation with camera-only autonomy for Teslas posed to innocent bystanders. Last August I followed up with Autonowashing, detailing the incredible "depths of irresponsibility involved in Tesla's marketing".

Josh Wolfe of Lux Capital is a very successful and innovative venture capitalist. Maxwell Strachan interviewed him for The ‘To the Moon’ Crash Is Coming. I think Wolfe captures the essence of the problem:
I think a lot of people took the Elon playbook and basically said, If I just promised the moon, I can get too big to fail, I can just keep raising money as I raise expectations. And if I raise expectations, fundamentals don't matter. The only thing that matters is expectations. And if I can keep leading people—or in some cases misleading them—then it'll keep working if I don't get caught. And if I do get caught, in the case of Theranos or in the case of Nikola [Editor’s note: the electric-truck maker that paid a $125 million after the SEC charged the company’s founder with misleading investors over social media], maybe you pay a fine or you have your day in court, and maybe Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is found guilty or maybe the zeitgeist of the day surprises and she's not. But so far, there has been really no great penalty for people whose relationship with the truth is less than ideal.
Musk doesn't care about the truth of his statements, or the impact of his companies' policies, because his wealth insulates him from consequences. If regulators or victims come after him he can tie them up in courts until their resources are exhausted or his fan-bois can make them irrelevant. Since Autonowashing I've been collecting illustrations of this attitude, and the time has come to lay out a sample of them below the fold.
There are a lot of examples, so I've organized them as follows:
  • His irresponsible behavior affecting the Stock Market.
  • Tesla's irresponsible behavior around its autonomy technology
  • SpaceX's irresposible behavior around its Starlink satellites, development of its Boca Chica base, and the idea of a Mars colony.
  • The Boring Company's irresponsible marketing of tunnels that simple math shows cannot deliver their claimed benefits.

Stock Market

TSLA 01/19/22
Since late 2019 Tesla stock has been remarkably volatile. Some of this is due to their delivering an impressive number of cars, and even making a profit on them over and above the sale of carbon credits. But that doesn't justify their current valuation of around a trillion dollars on a PE of 333.

As with Musk's interventions in the cryptocurrency market, pumping his HODL-ings of Dogecoin by tweeting, much of this run-up and subsequent volatility is clearly due to rampant speculation driven by Musk's tweets. In The “Tesla Financial Complex”: Financial Times Details Wildly Outsized Speculation in Tesla Options Yves Smith takes off from an article in the Financial Times by Robin Wrigglesworth entitled The ‘Tesla-financial complex’: how carmaker gained influence over the markets. Wrigglesworth starts:
One of Tesla’s oddest quirks is the fuel that has helped power its rocketing stock market value. Although its stock is wildly popular with many ordinary retail investors, the swelling size and hyperactivity of Tesla “options” — popular derivatives contracts that allow investors to bet both on and against a stock and magnify any gains and losses — has also flabbergasted many market veterans.

The nominal trading value of Tesla options has averaged $241bn a day in recent weeks, according to Goldman Sachs. That compares with $138bn a day for Amazon, the second most active single-stock option market, and $112bn a day for the rest of the S&P 500 index combined. This makes Tesla’s stock more prone to whipsaw movements, because of the “leverage” inherent in using options to trade.
In other words, TSLA options trading is half of options trading in the S&P500. Some days it is much more:
Golding estimates that historically the combined trading activity in US equity options has been between 10 and 20 times larger than activity in the biggest individual equity options market. However, there have been days recently where Tesla’s option trading activity has been five-to-six times the rest of the S&P 500 options ecosystem combined.
Yves Smith explains:
Reader HighlySuspect explained how the options trading gooses the stock price:
Market makers gladly sell call options to retail and make a huge profit doing so – it’s complicated but essentially the busy options market means call options are intrinsically overvalued and expensive, so market makers will sell these expensive options, hedge their position by actually buying Tesla stock, pocket the options premium, then sell the Tesla stock when the options position is closed. The market makers hedging by buying Tesla stock is actually one of the biggest factors behind the fast and enormous Tesla rallies – it’s an enormous source of buying.
Pink paper readers disputed a claim in the article, “Ordinary retail investors have been the primary power behind the Tesla options boom.” There is a whale in Tesla, billionaire Leo KoGuan who claimed he had bought nearly 7.2 million shares by early November, mainly though exercising call options. That makes him the third largest Tesla investor after Elon Musk and Larry Ellison.
Given this level of influence on the market, Musk's shoot-from-the-hip tweeting is unnacceptable to the SEC.
Mr Musk agreed a settlement with the SEC last year after the agency sued him for a tweet in which he claimed to have “funding secured” for a buyout of Tesla. The tweet was false, according to the SEC.
Did the settlement change anything?
In February the SEC claimed he violated the settlement, which required Mr Musk to get preapproval for any tweets containing material information about Tesla from an in-house lawyer. The claim followed a tweet by Mr Musk on February 19 about the number of cars Tesla would make in 2019, which he subsequently had to correct.

Last week Mr Musk’s attorneys revealed that none of the tweets about Tesla he had sent between the approval of the settlement and the SEC’s contempt motion had been preapproved.

The Tesla chief executive’s legal team argued that he had decided the tweets did not contain material information, and therefore did not need to be reviewed before publication.
Clearly the market wouldn't be interested in "the number of cars Tesla would make in 2019". The SEC disagreed:
The agency claimed that Mr Musk had shown “a brazen disregard” for the settlement and said his assertion that his February 19 tweet was immaterial “borders on the ridiculous”.

“[Mr] Musk’s shifting justifications suggest that there was never any good faith effort to comply with the court’s order and the Tesla policy,” said the SEC, referencing the settlement and the internal Tesla communications policy it required.

“Rather, [Mr] Musk has simply elected to ignore them,” the SEC said.
Musk has continued to tweet obviously market-moving information, such as this tweet from May 2020.
Chris Isidore's Musk's tweet raises doubt about Hertz's order for 100,000 Teslas is an example:
When Hertz announced plans to buy 100,000 Teslas last week — the largest-ever single order for electric vehicles — it was hailed as a breakthrough moment for the shift to EVs.
...
The "order" was thrown into doubt late Monday by — you guessed it — a tweet from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who appeared to question the certainty of the deal. "If any of this is based on Hertz, I'd like to emphasize that no contract has been signed yet," Musk tweeted, referring to the recent surge in Tesla shares following the rental car company's announcement.

Shares of Tesla fell around 2% Tuesday morning, improving on a drop of as much as 5% earlier in the day, but still well above where the stock was trading before Hertz announced its purchase plans.
In November, Musk did it again: Jamie Powell was skeptical in Elon tells us nothing new, but the market moves anyway:
The winner, with 57.9 per cent, is “Yes”. Suggesting Elon is set to dump circa 17m shares, some $21bn of stock, in the coming days, weeks or months. Simply because Twitter said he should. Well, that’s the line anyway.
It could be argued that this wasn't news. Powell writes:
Elon said as much in an interview with Silicon Valley frenemy Kara Swisher back in September. Here’s the key line (around 39 minutes):
Just before my stock options expire I’m forced to exercise, and the top marginal tax rate is 53 per cent. I have a bunch of options that are expiring early next year, so a huge block of options will sell in Q4 because I have to or they expire.
So was Elon’s tweet just a smokescreen for an inevitable stock sale? If so the media doesn’t seem to have been able to see through the Musk miasma. Google “Tesla” and you’ll find hundreds of articles repeating the line that Elon is going to sell shares because Twitter told him to. Which is probably a lot more manageable a story for shareholders than the sudden appearance of a SEC Form 4 on its website detailing the sales. The early trading suggests as much, with Tesla’s shares only off 5.4 per cent in pre-market, to $1,157.
Powell asks some good questions:
Was this market moving tweet approved by the SEC mandated “Twitter sitter” that is meant to oversee his communications related to Tesla? What does it say about the state of markets that a tweet with arguably no new information moves the market capitalisation of a company some $60bn? And, in perhaps a wider point, should major shareholders of the world’s largest companies conduct polls about stock sales on a website that is rife with bots, fake accounts and other chicanery?
Senators Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren think the answers are "no". Some class action lawyers agree with them, as Mike Leonard's Tesla Hit With Investor Lawsuit Over Musk’s Market-Moving Tweets makes clear:
Elon Musk, fresh off his coronation as Time Magazine’s “person of the year,” is facing more investor scrutiny over his tweets, this time with a Delaware lawsuit filed against Tesla Inc. on Thursday taking aim at a Twitter poll that asked if he should sell millions worth of stock.

The lawsuit, filed in Delaware Chancery Court, accuses Musk of continuing to tweet impulsively and recklessly, in violation of a 2019 agreement with securities regulators that required the company to adopt strict new internal oversight procedures for monitoring his online statements.

“It is unclear who at Tesla, if anyone, is currently reviewing Musk’s tweets” after its last full-time general counsel left in December 2019 and the most recent acting general counsel stepped down in April, the suit says.

Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday. The suit doesn’t name Musk as a defendant.

In addition to the poll and related tweets—which allegedly sent Tesla shares tumbling 5% on Nov. 5 and another 12% on Nov. 6—the investor suit targets Musk’s recent “Twitter feud with Sen. Elizabeth Warren,” the Massachusetts Democrat, which allegedly drove the stock price down another 9.6% between Dec. 13 and Wednesday.
This isn't the only lawsuit caused by Musk's irresponsible tweeting. Matt Levine's JPMorgan Fights Tesla Over Warrants describes an extremely complex lawsuit centered on warrants hedging Tesla's convertible bonds. The key issue is:
Elon Musk, the chief executive officer and major shareholder and memelord of Tesla, spent a couple of weeks pretending on Twitter that he was going to take Tesla private at $420 per share. If he had taken Tesla private, JPMorgan (and Tesla’s other banks) would definitely have adjusted their warrants and demanded a big payday. He did not do that; it was all pretend. But he did say he would.

And when he said that, in August 2018, JPMorgan said, well, okay, that's an announcement of a merger, we get to adjust the warrants.
And JP Morgan had good reasons to do so. For example:
At the time, Mr. Musk was not only Tesla’s CEO, but also the chair of its board of directors and its largest shareholder. In a Form 8-K filed on November 5, 2013, Tesla had identified Mr. Musk’s personal Twitter account as a source of material public information about the company and encouraged investors to review that account. Because the tweet violated Nasdaq rules requiring at least 10 minutes’ advance notice before a listed corporation publicly disclosed a going-private transaction, Nasdaq temporarily halted trading in Tesla’s stock following Mr. Musk’s tweet, evidencing that the exchange considered the tweet to constitute an announcement by the company itself.

Tesla

It is a sad fact about American capitalism that it cares more about the financial integrity of the stock market that the bodily integrity of the citizens who are at risk from Tesla's fan-bois debugging their cars' software. I wrote Elon Musk: Threat or Menace?" after reading Mack Hogan's article for Road and Track entitled Tesla's "Full Self Driving" Beta Is Just Laughably Bad and Potentially Dangerous:
In short, every Tesla owner who purchases "Full Self-Driving" is serving as an unpaid safety supervisor, conducting research on Tesla's behalf. Perhaps more damning, the company takes no responsibility for its actions and leaves it up to driver discretion to decide when and where to test it out.

That leads to videos like this, where early adopters carry out uncontrolled tests on city streets, with pedestrians, cyclists, and other drivers unaware that they're part of the experiment. If even one of those Tesla drivers slips up, the consequences can be deadly.
Source
Autonowashing was sparked in part by news that the National Traffic Highway Safety Administration was investigating:
11 crashes since 2018 in which Teslas on Autopilot or Traffic Aware Cruise Control have hit vehicles at scenes where first responders have used flashing lights, flares, an illuminated arrow board or cones warning of hazards.
...
The agency has sent investigative teams to 31 crashes involving partially automated driver assist systems since June of 2016. Such systems can keep a vehicle centered in its lane and a safe distance from vehicles in front of it. Of those crashes, 25 involved Tesla Autopilot in which 10 deaths were reported, according to data released by the agency.
Since then, the drumbeat has continued. Matt McFarland's We tried Tesla's 'full self-driving.' Here's what happened is scary:
I'd spent my morning so far in the backseat of the Model 3 using "full self-driving," the system that Tesla says will change the world by enabling safe and reliable autonomous vehicles. I'd watched the software nearly crash into a construction site, try to turn into a stopped truck and attempt to drive down the wrong side of the road. Angry drivers blared their horns as the system hesitated, sometimes right in the middle of an intersection.
Elon Musk's response was, as usual, denial:
I suspect that article was written before the drive even took place,
The cult members response was that "Full Self-Driving" wasn't working well because the driver in the front seat was "inexperienced". According to video demos from Tesla and many examples from fan-bois, "full self-driving" doesn't need a driver, experienced or not — Oh Great, They’re Filming Porn Inside Teslas on Autopilot:
videos like “Tinder Date Cums In Me In A Tesla On Autopilot” and “Sexy Brunette Fucking While The Car is Driving,” where performers squirm and moan in a sticky front seat while whoever’s filming periodically glances at the road, watching other drivers drift by while presumably not also humping.
Tim Stevens isn't impressed with Autopilot. In 2021 Tesla Model Y review: Nearly great, critically flawed he writes:
I can't conclusively say that it's because of the missing radar, but I can say that our Model Y is bad at detecting obstructions ahead. Really, really bad. The big issue is false positives, a problem that has become known as "phantom braking" among Tesla owners. Basically, the car often gets confused and thinks there's an obstacle ahead and engages the automatic emergency braking system. You get an instant, unwanted and often strong application of the brakes. This is not a problem unique to Teslas. I've experienced it on other cars, but very, very rarely. On our Model Y this happens constantly, at least once an hour and sometimes much more often than that. In a single hour of driving I caught five phantom braking incidents on camera, two hard enough to sound the automatic emergency braking chime.
Tesla vehicle in ‘Full Self-Driving’ beta mode ‘severely damaged’ after crash in California by Andrew J. Hawkins quotes the owners report to the NTHSA:
The Vehicle was in FSD Beta mode and while taking a left turn the car went into the wrong lane and I was hit by another driver in the lane next to my lane. the car gave an alert 1/2 way through the turn so I tried to turn the wheel to avoid it from going into the wrong lane but the car by itself took control and forced itself into the incorrect lane creating an unsafe maneuver putting everyone involved at risk. car is severely damaged on the driver side.
Taylor Ogan tweets a video showing another case of "full self-driving" taking the name too literally and refusing to yield control.

Jonathan M. Gitlin reports that Manslaughter charges follow Tesla driver’s Autopilot red light run:
Prosecutors in California have charged a Tesla driver with two counts of manslaughter as a result of a fatal crash in December 2019. According to the Associated Press, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration confirmed that the Autopilot driver-assistance feature was active at the time of the crash. That makes this case notable in that these are the first felony charges to result from a fatal crash involving a partially automated driving system.

The fatal crash took place in Gardena, California, on December 29, 2019. According to reports, the Tesla Model S owned by Kevin Riad exited I-91, failed to stop at a red light, and then collided with a Honda Civic, killing both of that car's occupants, Gilberto Alcazar Lopez and Maria Guadalupe Nieves-Lopez.
Even Tesla acknowledges that "Full Self-Driving" has problems. Keith Laing's Tesla Recalls Full Self-Driving Software After Fixing Bug reports that:
Tesla Inc. recalled more than 11,700 cars after a software update was found to increase the risk its so-called Full Self-Driving system could cause rear-end collisions.
...
NHTSA said in a statement that Tesla uninstalled the faulty version of the Full Self-Driving software “after receiving reports of inadvertent activation of the automatic emergency braking system.” The company informed NHTSA that it has updated and reinstalled the software on the cars, part of a beta release of a feature it hopes will one day enable its vehicles to be self-driving.
...
In September, Tesla drew criticism after it beamed an over-the-air software update to its vehicles aimed at improving how its driver-assistance system Autopilot handles crash scenes without initiating a recall.
Faiz Siddiqui reports that Tesla gives ‘Full Self-Driving’ to a new crop of users, then takes it away after apparent software bugs:
The company had rolled out a new version of its driver-assistance software to an expanded group of users over the weekend, but Musk said that it proved problematic and that the company was working on fixes.
“Seeing some issues with [version] 10.3, so rolling back to 10.2 temporarily,” he wrote in a tweet. “Please note, this is to be expected with beta software. It is impossible to test all hardware configs in all conditions with internal [quality assurance], hence public beta.”
Unlike in September, Tesla actually did notify the NHTSA. Notice the explicit acknowledgement that "Full Self-Driving Beta" is a test program. In California, companies running autonomous driving test programs are required to report to the DMV, but Tesla doesn't. As Russ Mitchell reports in DMV ‘revisiting’ its approach to regulating Tesla’s public self-driving test, California State Senator Lena Gonzalez has understood the dangers to the public of Tesla's fan-bois using the laughably named "Full Self Driving" option on public streets:
Concerned about public safety, Gonzalez asked the DMV in December for its take on Tesla’s Full Self-Driving beta program, under which Tesla owners supervise the operation of cars programmed to autonomously navigate highways, city streets and neighborhood roads, stopping at traffic lights and stop signs as well as making left and right turns into traffic. Those are the same features being tested by other robot car developers that report crashes and disengagements to the DMV, a group that includes Waymo, Cruise, Argo and Zoox. Although their cars occasionally crash, there are few YouTube videos that show them behaving dangerously.
...
For years, Tesla has tested autonomous vehicle technology on public roads without reporting crashes and system failures to the California Department of Motor Vehicles, as other robot car developers are required to do under DMV regulations. But confronted with dozens of viral videos showing Tesla’s Full Self-Driving beta technology driving the car into dangerous situations, and a letter of concern from a key state legislator, the DMV now says it’s reviewing Tesla’s behavior and reassessing its own policies. The agency informed Tesla on Jan. 5 that it is “revisiting” its opinion that the company’s test program doesn’t fall under the department’s autonomous vehicle regulations because it requires a human driver. “Recent software updates, videos showing dangerous use of that technology, open investigations by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and the opinions of other experts in this space” prompted the reevaluation
Tesla tells regulators that Autopilot and "Full Self-Driving" are Level 2 driver assistance systems that require the driver to be ready at all times to take over control. Since they are not testing an autonomous driving system, they don't need to file reports. But that's not what Tesla tells the fan-bois taking part in their beta test program, let alone the porn film producers.

Alissa Walker reports from CES in Two of Elon Musk’s Terrible Ideas Both Flopped in Las Vegas This Week:
part of the convention center’s parking lot has been blocked off for an autonomous-vehicle demonstration to show how well various automakers’ pedestrian-detection systems work. A small figure meant to represent a child crossing the street is placed in front of the vehicles, which navigate toward the figure, detect something in the road using their onboard LIDAR systems, and stop. Except the Tesla vehicles, that is, which are not equipped with LIDAR and repeatedly run the kid over. This is a demonstration set up by a LIDAR company, of course, but the sentiment that automated cars should have multiple, redundant detection systems is widely shared by industry safety experts.
Why don't Teslas have "multiple, redundant detection systems" such as LIDAR? In Inside Tesla as Elon Musk Pushed an Unflinching Vision for Self-Driving Cars Cade Metz and Neal E. Boudette explain:
Unlike technologists at almost every other company working on self-driving vehicles, Mr. Musk insisted that autonomy could be achieved solely with cameras tracking their surroundings. But many Tesla engineers questioned whether it was safe enough to rely on cameras without the benefit of other sensing devices — and whether Mr. Musk was promising drivers too much about Autopilot’s capabilities.
Musk's response to all these safety concerns is to attack the regulator on Twitter. Aria Alamalhodaei's Buttigieg defends safety agency appointment after Musk claims ‘bias’ reports:
Musk has taken umbrage with the appointment of Duke University engineering and computer science professor Missy Cummings as a safety adviser at the National Traffic Highway Safety Administration (NHTSA). “Objectively, her track record is extremely biased against Tesla,” he said Tuesday.
...
Tesla supporters, under the banner “Autopilot Users for Progress,” have started a Change.org petition urging President Joe Biden and NHTSA staff to review the appointment for concerns regarding conflict of interest and bias.
Musk using Twitter to rile up his fan-bois to attack critics is a long-standing pattern. The Anger of Tesla Fans Is Becoming a Problem by David Zipper describes it:
A couple of hours after the news broke, Omar Qazi, a Tesla booster with a large online following, tweeted, “If they try and take Autopilot away from us we will riot so hard January 6 will look like a day at Disneyland,” concluding with a laughing emoji. Qazi later deleted the tweet, issuing an apology and claiming it was a joke.

That may be true, but much of the online Tesla community seemed to be having a meltdown (including more than a few people who employed disturbing and misogynistic language). ... Elon Musk himself tweeted, “Objectively, her track record is extremely biased against Tesla,” and then jokingly responded to a fake account created in Cummings’ name. On Thursday evening, after enduring two days of online harassment, Cummings seemingly deleted her Twitter account.
...
If there was ever any doubt, the online firestorm over Cummings’ appointment shows that a federal crackdown on Tesla will meet fierce opposition—much of it coming from the hundreds of thousands of Americans who own one of the company’s vehicles (all Teslas purchased after October 2016 come equipped with Autopilot). And that pushback is likely to be inevitable, despite ample evidence that Tesla’s deployment of Autopilot and Full Self-Driving is endangering road users.

If NHTSA ultimately forces Tesla to remove or constrain the use of Autopilot, thousands of Tesla owners will rebel against being deprived of something they thought they owned. Even though they never should have had access to that something in the first place.
Two "WTF were they thinking" things illustrate Musk's attitude to the legal and safety requirements of a Level 2 driver assistance system, which as Tesla's documentation says:
Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Capability are intended for use with a fully attentive driver, who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment.
First, A New Tesla Safety Concern: Drivers Can Play Video Games in Moving Cars by Neal Boudette reveals that the "fully attentive driver" can be playing video games on the car's screen:
The automaker added the games in an over-the-air software update that was sent to most of its cars this summer. They can be played by a driver or by a passenger in full view of the driver, raising fresh questions about whether Tesla is compromising safety as it rushes to add new technologies and features in its cars.
Second, Emma Roth's Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ beta has an ‘assertive’ driving mode that ‘may perform rolling stops’ reveals that the cars are programmed to break the law:
The feature was included in the October 2021 version 10.3 update, which was pulled two days after it started rolling out due to an issue with left turns at traffic lights. Tesla issued version 10.3.1 one day later, which still includes FSD profiles, as shown on the release notes posted on Not a Tesla App. Based on these notes, FSD profiles are described as a way “to control behaviors like rolling stops, speed-based lane changes, following distance and yellow light headway.”
Musk is basically trolling the regulators for laughs, never mind the risks.

SpaceX

“`Space,' it says, `is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.'”
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Elon Musk agrees with the Guide:
“Space is just extremely enormous, and satellites are very tiny,” Musk said. “This is not some situation where we’re effectively blocking others in any way. We’ve not blocked anyone from doing anything, nor do we expect to.”
Near-Earth space isn't that big. CNBC reports that Elon Musk, SpaceX face online backlash in China after space station near-misses:
Elon Musk and SpaceX faced an online backlash in China this week after a note sent to the United Nations revealed that some of the company's satellites nearly collided with China's space station on two separate occasions in 2021.
...
NASA was forced to abruptly call off a spacewalk at the end of November, citing risks posed by space debris. Musk tweeted in response that some Starlink satellite orbits had been adjusted to reduce the possibility of collisions.
In ESA head says Europe needs to stop facilitating Elon Musk’s ambitions in space, Peggy Hollinger and Clive Cookson report:
Aschbacher said Musk’s Starlink was already so big that it was difficult for regulators or rivals to catch up. “You have one person owning half of the active satellites in the world. That’s quite amazing. De facto, he is making the rules. The rest of the world including Europe... is just not responding quick enough.”
...
The rush to tap the potential of commercial space—made possible by falling launch costs and cheaper, smaller satellites—has fueled concern over the absence of a global space-traffic management system for low Earth orbit, a region of up to 2,000 km above the Earth where most new commercial services are targeted.
Richard Waters' Elon Musk rejects claims his satellites are squeezing out rivals in space describes the response:
Elon Musk has hit back at criticism that his company’s Starlink satellites are hogging too much room in space, and has instead argued there could be room for “tens of billions” of spacecraft in orbits close to Earth.
...
His comments, made in an interview with the Financial Times, came in response to a claim from Josef Aschbacher, head of the European Space Agency, that Musk was “making the rules” for the new commercial space economy. Speaking to the FT earlier this month, Aschbacher warned that Musk’s rush to launch thousands of communications satellites would leave fewer radio frequencies and orbital slots available for everyone else.
There are a number of problems with flooding near-Earth space with "tens of billions" of satellites. John Timmer discusses the first in Astronomers find growing number of Starlink satellite tracks:
How bad is the problem? A team of astronomers has used archival images from a survey telescope to look for Starlink tracks over the past two years. Over that time, the number of images affected rose by a factor of 35, and the researchers estimate that by the time the planned Starlink constellation is complete, pretty much every image from their hardware will have at least one track in it.
The more serious one is the Kessler Syndrome:
a scenario in which the density of objects in low Earth orbit (LEO) due to space pollution is high enough that collisions between objects could cause a cascade in which each collision generates space debris that increases the likelihood of further collisions.In 2009 Kessler wrote that modeling results had concluded that the debris environment was already unstable, "such that any attempt to achieve a growth-free small debris environment by eliminating sources of past debris will likely fail because fragments from future collisions will be generated faster than atmospheric drag will remove them". One implication is that the distribution of debris in orbit could render space activities and the use of satellites in specific orbital ranges difficult for many generations.
Anton Petrov discusses the current situation in this video. In essence, humanity's future access to space depends upon SpaceX flawlessly managing a fleet of satellites vastly bigger than anyone else ever has, indefinitely into the future.

Musk isn't just playing fast and loose with Starlink's regulators. Mark Harris' The mystery of Elon Musk’s missing gas provides another example:
The draft programmatic environmental assessment (PEA) for SpaceX’s Starship and Super Heavy launch vehicles, which Elon Musk hopes will soon be shooting into orbit and then on to Mars, was issued last month by the FAA for public comment. The 142-page document covers construction and daily operations at SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility in Texas, which Musk is hoping to incorporate as a city called Starbase. These include pre-flight operations, rocket tests, launches and landings, as well as fuel, water and electricity supplies.

A new pre-treatment system will purify and cool natural gas into liquid methane fuel for the Starship and Super Heavy rockets. Much more gas will be needed for a new 250-megawatt gas-fired power station. A power plant this big typically serves over 100,000 homes and can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. But while rocket launches get a lot of coverage in the PEA, the new power plant receives only a cursory mention. In particular, it is unclear how the tens of millions of cubic feet of gas required daily will get to SpaceX’s remote facility near the Mexican border.

Failing to mention this in the PEA is unusual, and possibly contravenes the federal National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), says Pat Parenteau, professor of law and senior counsel in the Environmental Advocacy Clinic at Vermont Law School.
Starship and Super Heavy are parts of Musk's plan to colonize Mars to escape from the climate and other dooms facing Earth. George Steer's Do the sums behind Musk’s space colony mission add up? looks at the math. First, Musk's math:
Elon Musk told US podcaster Lex Fridman in December that establishing a “self-sustaining civilisation” on Mars will remain science fiction until the cost of flying goods there falls by a factor of 1,000 from its current level of $1bn to around $1m per ton, or “ideally much less”. A cool million is still pretty expensive, even when the recent surge in the cost of boring old earthbound trade is taken into account. Musk thinks 1m tons of materials would be needed to build the necessary infrastructure on what he admits is “a doer-upper” of a planet. So that adds up to $1tn; a pretty hefty price tag.
Source
He's just pulling numbers out of thin air trying to justify governments funding him, becuase even Musk can't afford to spend $1012 on his Mars dream. Second, the experts' math:
Starship, designed by Musk’s SpaceX to one day carry 100 tons of cargo, consists of a spacecraft fixed atop a reusable rocket. Once in orbit, the spacecraft needs ten rocket trips to refuel. In order for Musk’s sums to work, to carry 1m tons of material to Mars, the rocket would need to launch 100,000 times at an average cost of no more than $10m each trip.

And while a $1tn sounds a lot, it’s not too much more than the annual budget for the US military. “Musk has enough money to send a couple of ships and a few people, enough to make a start,” says Handmer.
This is a "fake it until you make it" strategy. Handmer's chart:
plots the fraction of goods by mass that are locally manufactured against the number of people necessary. His best guess is that it would take 100,000 Martian colonisers, to even get to a level where they could manufacture relatively uncomplicated industrial goods.
But the colony would need over a million population to stand a good chance of surviving a supply chain interruption. A world struggling to survive climate change isn't a good basis for the kind of enormously costly sustained supply chain that Musk's vision requires.

Boring Company

Alissa Walker's Two of Elon Musk’s Terrible Ideas Both Flopped in Las Vegas This Week reports:
In 2019, the Las Vegas Convention Center became the first paying customer of Musk’s tunnel-digging operation, the Boring Company. The city’s tourism agency paid him $50 million to build a pair of one-mile tunnels beneath the recently expanded convention halls, promising to turn a 20-minute walk into a one-minute ride. This week, a one-minute video showed the vehicle stuck in traffic for at least that long, as the driver — a human; more on that in a minute — merges into an underground parking garage, where dozens of people are getting into seemingly ordinary cars, all of them also about to get stuck in seemingly ordinary traffic, except they’re trapped inside what looks like the world’s longest MRI machine.
Walker continues:
Remember that in this particular transportation system of the future, Musk was contractually obligated to deliver a specific daily ridership to the convention center: 4,000 people per hour for 13 hours per day during major trade shows. (The contract also has penalties for failure to meet these numbers: $300,000 per trade show for a maximum of $4.5 million.) ... But it’s plain to any observer that there are not 4,000 people moving through this tunnel per hour, and recent data showed it’s more like 1,300 people per hour — about the capacity of standard (and, often, autonomous) people-movers all over Vegas — meaning the Boring Company has massively shortchanged its client.

Coda

In Dick Moves, Linsey McGoey writes:
Musk whined that Sanders is a ‘taker, not a maker’, delighting the hard-right libertarians who love it when billionaires attack governments. Which is something that Musk does a lot, but he needs the US government too, not least to further his own wealth. For one thing, SpaceX and Tesla have both benefited from government subsidies. But there’s more to it than that. ‘We will coup whoever we want!’ Musk tweeted and deleted in 2020. ‘Deal with it.’

He was responding to criticism of US involvement in the 2019 overthrow of Evo Morales’s government in Bolivia, a country with major reserves of lithium, which is used in the batteries of smartphones and electric cars. After a right-wing, US-backed government assumed office (later jettisoned at the ballot box), Tesla’s stock soared.

119 comments:

David. said...

Jane Wakefield reports on the UK Law Commissions' thoughts in Major legal changes needed for driverless car era (my emphasis):

"In these cars, the driver should be redefined as a "user-in-charge", with very different legal responsibilities, according to the law commissions for England and Wales, and Scotland.

If anything goes wrong, the company behind the driving system would be responsible, rather than the driver.

And a new regime should define whether a vehicle qualifies as self-driving.

In the interim, carmakers must be extremely clear about the difference between self-drive and driver-assist features.

There should be no sliding scale of driverless capabilities - a car is either autonomous or not.

And if any sort of monitoring is required - in extreme weather conditions, for example - it should not be considered autonomous and current driving rules should apply."

And:

"sanctions for carmakers who fail to reveal how their systems work"

David. said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
David. said...

The regulators aren't amused by Tesla's little joke, as David Shepardson reports in Tesla to recall nearly 54,000 vehicles that may disobey stop signs:

"Tesla Inc will recall 53,822 U.S. vehicles with the company's Full Self-Driving (Beta) software that may allow some models to conduct "rolling stops" and not come to a complete stop at some intersections posing a safety risk.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said the recall covers some 2016-2022 Model S and Model X, 2017-2022 Model 3, and 2020-2022 Model Y vehicles. NHTSA said the feature also known as FSD Beta may allow vehicles to travel through an all-way stop intersection without first coming to a stop.
...
The feature, which appeared to violate state laws that require vehicles to come to a complete stop and required drivers to opt-in for what it dubbed "Assertive" mode, drew attention on social media and prompted NHTSA to raise questions with Tesla."

David. said...

The recall didn't fix the problem, as Faiz Siddiqui and Jeremy B. Merrill report in Tesla drivers report a surge in ‘phantom braking’:

"Teslas are unexpectedly slamming on their brakes in response to imagined hazards — such as oncoming traffic on two-lane roads — which has prompted their terrified owners to lodge a surge of complaints with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration over the past three months, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal auto safety data.

The phenomenon, known as “phantom braking,” has been a persistent issue for Tesla vehicles.
...
In addition to the safety recall in late October, the timing of the complaints coincides with a period in which Tesla has stopped using radar sensors in its vehicles to supplement the suite of cameras that perceive their surroundings. Tesla announced last year that it would stop equipping Tesla Model Y and Model 3 vehicles built in North America with radar beginning in May 2021."

David. said...

Tom Krisher reports that Tesla recalls over 800K vehicles for seat belt chime problem:

"Tesla is recalling more than 817,000 vehicles in the U.S. because the seat belt reminder chimes may not sound when the vehicles are started and the driver hasn't buckled up."

David. said...

Jonathan Gitlin's AAA tests driver-monitoring systems, finds many lacking shows that torque-based systems such as Tesla's are completely inadequate:

"The testers found that it was possible to actively circumvent attention warnings in all four cars. The Subaru was the most resistant to circumvention, but drivers were able to increase the average distraction time to 79.4 seconds. And for the Cadillac, this stretched to 191 seconds. But the indirect driver-monitoring systems in the Hyundai and Tesla were far easier to fool—the distraction times in these cars could be stretched to 334.7 seconds (Hyundai) and 342.2 seconds (Tesla)."

That is almost 6 minutes of distraction before an alert, or nearly 6.2 miles at 65mph.

David. said...

@teslaownersSV asked:

"Elon what’s the eta for the full stack fsd beta"

@elonmusk replied:

"We have to solve a huge part of AI just to make cars drive themselves.

In retrospect, it was inevitable. The road system is designed for cameras (eyes) & neural nets (brains)."

@DerivativeV translated:

"His answer translates as follows:

10-30 years"

David. said...

Laura Kolodny's Tesla cut a steering component from some cars to deal with chip shortage, sources say reveals that:

"Under pressure to hit fourth-quarter sales goals while coping with widespread semiconductor shortages, Tesla decided to remove one of the two electronic control units that are normally included in the steering racks of some made-in-China Model 3 and Model Y cars, according to two employees and internal correspondence seen by CNBC.
...
They also said that the exclusion would not cause safety issues, since the removed part was deemed a secondary electronic control unit, used mainly as a backup."

Redundancy isn't a safety issue, right?

David. said...

The regulators' unhappiness with Tesla's casual attitude to safety continues, as Richard Currie reports in 'Boombox' function sparks Tesla recall:

"An external speaker function in 578,607 Teslas will be disabled by the electric vehicle manufacturer this month after the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said it interfered with safety standards."

David. said...

In ‘Full Self-Driving’ clips show owners of Teslas fighting for control, and experts see deep flaws, Faiz Siddiqui and Reed Albergotti:

"selected six videos from a large array posted on YouTube and contacted the people who shot them to confirm their authenticity. The Post then recruited a half-dozen experts to conduct a frame-by-frame analysis."

The conclusion:

"Their analysis suggests that, as currently designed, Full Self-Driving (FSD) could be dangerous on public roadways, according to several of the experts. Some defects appear to plague multiple versions of Tesla’s software, such as inability to recognize light-rail tracks: One video shows a driver shifting into reverse after traveling too far onto the tracks.

“The video [footage] shows different scenarios where the automated driving system was not able to detect and/or cope with relevant features of its Operational Design Domain,” or the conditions under which the system is expected to safely operate, said Nicola Croce, technical program manager at Deepen AI, which helps companies deploy driver-assistance and autonomous-driving systems. Tesla is not one of its clients.

Lapses within the design domain, Croce said, are “considered a failure to follow the safety expectations.”

Tesla did not respond to repeated requests for comment."

The details are fascinating.

David. said...

CNBC has a video featuring three ride-alongs with FSD Beta testers, in Murfreesboro TN, Brooklyn NY, and Dan Francisca CA. The TL;DR is that the system works OK in good weather in suburban Murfreesboro, but ranges from incompetent to dangerous in the urban settings, and can't deal with rain and snow in Murfreesboro. CNBC does a good job of contextualizing the ride-alongs.

David. said...

Jon Shazar's Elon Musk Asks Judge To Let Him Ignore SEC Settlement That He’s Been Ignoring Anyway is subtitled "Any other outcome would amount to intolerable persecution of a billionaire":

"I mean, where does one start? With the fact that commercial speech such as that regulated by the SEC doesn’t enjoy full First Amendment protection? With the fact that no other company has had to hire a social-media babysitter for its chief executive to keep him from violating securities law, rendering any question of “evenhanded” comparison moot? With the fact that Musk agreed to the terms of this legal settlement and has brazenly violated it over and over and over again?"

David. said...

Matt Levine's take on Musk's failure to obey the SEC settlement he signed:

"I did not reckon with the fact that Musk also has a lot of discretionary power and does not like being disrespected, and if he doesn’t like the SEC he can do a lot to wear them down too. He has apparently tried to destroy the careers of the SEC enforcement lawyers who went after him, and he has at least as much power to pester them in court as they do to pester him. Surely the outcome of the Musk/SEC fight is much less “Musk has been deterred from carelessly tweeting material things about Tesla” and much more “the SEC has been deterred from going after Musk.” That’s a kind of legal realism too."

One law for the poor, no law for the rich.

David. said...

Kari Paul reports that Elon Musk and brother under investigation for alleged insider trading:

"The US Securities and Exchange Commission has reportedly opened an investigation into whether recent stock sales by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and his brother Kimbal Musk violated insider trading rules.

The SEC inquiry – first reported by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday – was sparked in part by the Tesla CEO’s own tweets.

It centers on an incident last year when Kimbal – who sits on Tesla’s board of directors – sold $108m of shares in the electric carmaker. The exchange took place just a day before before Musk polled Twitter users asking whether he should offload 10% of his stake in Tesla, sending shares falling."

David. said...

From the "killing the messenger" department comes Jon Brodkin's Tesla fires employee who posted YouTube videos of Full Self-Driving accident:

"Bernal was fired and lost beta access after video review showed a minor collision."

It is OK to post videos of the system succeeding, but not OK to post videos of it failing.

David. said...

The SEC's response to Elon Musk's attempt to wriggle out of the deal he and Tesla signed to monitor his efforts to manipulate the market via Twitter is a fun read:

"In sum, in 2018, to settle the SEC's action against him, Musk agreed to comply with Tesla's mandatory procedures requiring pre-approval of certain of his Tesla-related public communications. Musk cannot now cast off the Amended Final Judgment simply because he has found complying with Tesla's procedures to be less convenient than he had hoped, or because he wishes the SEC would not investigate whether Tesla's disclosure controls and procedures are actually being maintained and followed."

David. said...

Laurie Clarke's How self-driving cars got stuck in the slow lane is a good overview:

"There’s reason to believe that the videos that make their way online are some of the more flattering ones. Not only are the testers Tesla customers, but an army of super-fans acts as an extra deterrent to sharing anything negative. Any reports of FSD behaving badly can trigger a wave of outrage; any critical posts on the Tesla Motors Club, a forum for Tesla drivers, are inevitably greeted by people blaming users for accidents or accusing them of wanting Tesla to fail. “People are terrified that Elon Musk will take away the FSD that they paid for and that people will attack them,” says Ogan.

This helps to shield Tesla from criticism, says Ed Niedermeyer, the author of Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, who was “bombarded by an online militia” when he started reporting on the company. “Throughout Tesla’s history, this faith and sense of community… has been absolutely critical to Tesla’s survival,” he says. The proof, he adds, is that Musk can claim again and again to be a year from reaching full autonomous driving without losing the trust of fans."

David. said...

Faiz Siddiqui's How auto regulators played mind games with Elon Musk looks at the problem facing regulators:

"The threat of fines — which can add up to nearly $115 million — generally works with traditional companies, the former officials said, but hasn’t proven effective when dealing with Tesla, an extraordinarily valuable company owned by the richest man in the world.
...
Musk’s own attitude was part of the problem with efforts to enforce safety, the officials said. Some experienced personal encounters with Musk that escalated into yelling matches or otherwise proved unproductive because of the CEO’s skepticism about their findings.
...
Since 2016, NHTSA has opened 31 special crash investigation cases involving advanced driver-assistance technology, according to data provided by the agency. Twenty-four have involved Tesla vehicles."

David. said...

The latest candidate for Satoshi Nakamoto-hood is Elon Musk!

David. said...

Jamie Powell reports that Elon Musk becomes Twitter’s largest shareholder:

"Musk’s 9.2 per cent Twitter stake would make him the largest shareholder in the company. Notably it’s more than quadruple the 2.25 per cent position of founder Jack Dorsey."

David. said...

Bryce Elder's Musk’s Twitter play explained in tweets concludes:

"In February, Elon denied passing information that could have hurt Tesla’s stock price to Kimbal after the Wall Street Journal reported that both men have become the subject of an insider trading investigation by US regulators. It’s much too early to say whether trading in the aftermath of the Musk Twitter poll also merits an SEC investigation, but the type and timeline of purchases and disclosures definitely look worthy of attention."

David. said...

Jon Brodkin's Elon Musk given Twitter board seat in return for promising not to buy more of company reports that:

"Elon Musk is joining Twitter's board of directors in a deal that prohibits him from buying more than 14.9 percent of the company's stock, Twitter announced today. The news of Musk joining the board comes one day after the Tesla and SpaceX CEO revealed that he had purchased 9.2 percent of Twitter shares."

Rob Beschizza commented:

"Musk recently suggested that Twitter was failing to embody free speech principles and that he might found a competitor. But Musk also fired an employee for posting something he didn't like on YouTube and falsely accused one critic of being a pedophile. So there are no principles or plans here, just the whims of a man with a budget.

Who, by the way, one is now working for when one posts on Twitter!"

David. said...

Lawsuit: Musk saved $143 million by illegally waiting to disclose Twitter stake by Jon Brodkin reports that:

"Elon Musk is facing a shareholder lawsuit over his failure to reveal his investment in Twitter until 11 days after a deadline set by federal law.

Musk started buying Twitter stock in January and acquired more than 5 percent of all shares by March 14, the lawsuit said. Under US law, "Musk was required to file a Schedule 13 with the SEC within 10 days of passing the 5 percent ownership threshold in Twitter, or March 24, 2022," said the complaint filed yesterday in US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Twitter's stock rose 27 percent on April 4 when Musk revealed his 9.2 percent stake. This means that investors who sold before April 4 missed out on the gains and that Musk was able to keep buying shares at artificially low prices"

David. said...

Carla Sinclair reports that Man's Tesla froze while speeding down highway at 83 mph:

"A man was stuck behind the wheel of a speeding Tesla as the car's computer froze while driving at 85 mph. The man says all of the controls stopped working — including the turn signal, hazard lights, accelerator, and main screen — while on a highway in Southern California. Thankfully, the one thing that did work was his brake, but he thought using it might put him in danger."

David. said...

Lora Kolodny reports in Elon Musk's tweets about taking Tesla private were false, new court filing says that:

"A court filing out late Friday said a judge ruled Tesla CEO Elon Musk knowingly made false statements when he tweeted about a take-private deal for the company in 2018."

David. said...

Samantha Cole's Watch an Autopiloted Tesla Crash Into a Multimillion-Dollar Jet reports on an expensive oopsie:

"Tesla Model Ys have a feature called “Smart Summon” that, when activated, will call the car to its owner; for example, bring it from the back of a parking lot to the curb of a store where they’re waiting. In this video, the Tesla in question creeps up to a Cirrus Vision jet, collides with its tail, and keeps pushing, moving the more than 1.5-ton jet around in a half-circle before it stops."

David. said...

Erin Woo's In tweets, Musk takes aim at Twitter executives, creating outrage reports:

"On Tuesday night, Mr. Musk began tweeting critically about Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s top lawyer and safety expert, and Jim Baker, the deputy general counsel. Ms. Gadde has been instrumental in building up content policies at Twitter and was involved in last year’s decision to bar former President Donald J. Trump from the platform.

Mr. Musk responded to a tweet on Tuesday criticizing Ms. Gadde’s apparent response to Mr. Musk’s deal to buy Twitter. He also posted a critical comment about Mr. Baker’s past behavior."

The result, of course, was that Musk's cult members piled on to them. Kurt Wagner noted in Musk Is Barred From Disparaging Twitter When Tweeting About Deal:

"Elon Musk isn’t allowed to post tweets about his deal to buy Twitter Inc. if they “disparage the company or any of its representatives,” according to a new securities filing following Monday’s $44 billion takeover agreement.

The stipulation was part of a filing Tuesday with details of the transaction, including a section on “public announcements” that had a limitation on what Musk can tweet.
...
“The equity investor shall be permitted to issue tweets about the merger or the transactions contemplated hereby so long as such tweets do not disparage the company or any of its representatives,” according to the filing. It’s unclear what would happen if Musk violates the agreement."

There will be no consequences because Musk is the richest person in the (Western) world.

If you want to understand what's going on with Musk buying Twitter, I suggest you read Ranjan Roy's Elon's Giant Package. It is really scary.

David. said...

To do Musk justice, David Patrikarakos tweets:

"I want to say one thing: @elonmusk's Starlink is what changed the war in #Ukraine's favour. #Russia went out of its way to blow up all our comms. Now they can't. Starlink works under Katyusha fire, under artillery fire. It even works in Mariupol."

David. said...

Among the investors in Musk's buyout of Twitter are:

HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud $1.9B
Larry Ellison $1B
Sequoia Capital $0.8B
Vy Capital $0.7B (Dubai)
Binance $0.5B
A16Z $0.4B

David. said...

@AiAddict demonstrates the inability of Tesla's FSD to respond correctly to obstacles increasing in size from a plastic bucket to a pickup truck.

David. said...

Craig Trudell and Keith Laing have a detailed update on the glacial pace of NHTSA's investigations in Tesla Autopilot Stirs U.S. Alarm as ‘Disaster Waiting to Happen’:

"NHTSA has repeatedly reminded the public — including in comments provided for this story — that no commercially available vehicle can drive itself. The agency has opened 31 special investigations into crashes involving driver-assistance systems, 24 of which involved Teslas. But the company keeps hawking FSD — and charges $12,000 for it.

There’s growing discomfort with this state of play in Washington.

“I really dislike a lot of what Tesla has done, and at the top of the list in bright, bold letters, is Elon Musk’s habit of making false public claims, and using his podium in a way that creates safety risks,” Heidi King, a deputy and acting administrator of NHTSA during the Trump administration, said in an interview."

David. said...

Erin Marquis' 'Self-Driving' Level 2 Autonomy Systems Still Pretty Crappy: AAA Study reports that:

"AAA’s Automotive Engineering ran a 2021 Subaru Forester with “EyeSight,” a 2021 Hyundai Santa Fe with “Highway Driving Assist” and a 2020 Tesla Model 3 with “Autopilot” through 15 test runs using a foam dummy car and bicyclist. The results weren’t great:

• A head-on collision occurred during all 15 test runs for an oncoming vehicle within the travel lane. Only one test vehicle significantly reduced speed before a crash on each run.

• For a slow lead vehicle moving in the same direction in the lane ahead, no collisions occurred among 15 test runs.

• For a cyclist crossing the travel lane of the test vehicle, a collision occurred for 5 out of 15 test runs, or 33% of the time.

• For a cyclist traveling in the same direction in the lane ahead of the test vehicle, no collisions occurred among 15 test runs."

David. said...

Matt Levine takes Elon Musk to the woodshed in Elon Musk Does Not Care About Spam Bots:

"I think it is important to be clear here that Musk is lying. The spam bots are not why he is backing away from the deal, as you can tell from the fact that the spam bots are why he did the deal. He has produced no evidence at all that Twitter’s estimates are wrong, and certainly not that they are materially wrong or made in bad faith. (Musk can only get out of the deal if Twitter's filings are wrong in a way that would cause a “material adverse effect” on Twitter, which is vanishingly unlikely.) His own supposed methodology for counting spam bots is laughable."

You really need to read the whole thing.

Note Musk just tweeted:

“In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party,” Musk wrote. “But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold ... ”

David. said...

E.W. Niedermeyer's must-read thread nails it.

David. said...

In Elon Musk Completes Transition to Supervillain With Bolsonaro Meeting in Brazil, Kyle Barr reports that:

"There’s a lot of scandals hitting Tesla CEO Elon Musk all at once, but at least he knows he has a friend in Brazil’s deforester-in-chief Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing demagogue who similarly to Musk, has a very hard time taking any sort of public criticism, and has tried using the power of his office to make sure his conspiracies don’t get deplatformed."

Ian F. Adams said...

As a personal anecdote on "driver assist" tools, even something as relatively straightforward as radar assisted cruise-control can be dodgy. I had my brakes slammed on me at highway speed when my Toyota pickup got confused by entering a tunnel (no traffic in either direction).

On my family's ford escape we promptly disabled all the lane assist stuff as it was garbage and jerking the car somewhat randomly and alarmingly.

The *only* feature I've found at least intermittently useful and not actively dangerous was a lane drift warning that would make some beeping when it thinks you're leaving a lane. But only worked reliably on long freeway stretches. On the rural highway I live off of which is all curves it was more of a nuisance.

David. said...

Russ Mitchell's Company insiders rip Tesla’s stance on safety in hard-hitting Elon Musk doc covers:

"the new documentary “Elon Musk’s Crash Course.”

Premiering Friday on FX and Hulu, the 75-minute fright show spotlights the persistent dangers of Tesla’s automated driving technologies, the company’s lax safety culture, Musk’s P.T. Barnum-style marketing hype and the weak-kneed safety regulators who seem not to care."

Takewaways:

"1. Tesla’s Autopilot feature did not receive adequate testing, ex-employees allege

2. Fully autonomous Teslas are more science-fiction than reality

3. Musk’s fans don’t hold back. Even on camera

4. Regulatory failures are part of the problem"

David. said...

Carla Sinclair reports that At least two Teslas catch fire in separate incidents over the weekend:

1) "One Tesla burst into flames last Friday in Vancouver, Canada. The driver, whose battery suddenly died, got trapped inside his 2021 Tesla Model Y that was filling up with smoke. "The power didn't work, the door didn't open, the window didn't go down," he told YouTube's Storyful. He broke a window to escape, and soon after, the car became engulfed with flames." video

2) "The second fire occurred on Sunday at a Tesla dealership in Mimai [sic], which damaged three cars on the lot". video

David. said...

Brad DeLong on Tesla’s Valuation(s) is a fascinating read:

"Selling all the cars sold in America, and selling each for a profit of $20,000 per car, and getting there very quickly (for money in fifteen years is worth half of money today at standard equity discount rates)—that is what the marginal Tesla shareholder right now is “thinking” about Tesla and its prospects."

Or:

"Five years ago it was valued at 1/10 as much—that would be, if it obtained maturity fifteen years (now ten years out, in 2032), a quarter of the American car market with a profit of $8,000 per car: the equivalent of the old Ford Motor Company in its glory days, in a boom year."

David. said...

In Tesla’s Full Self-Driving made this man so mad he’s running for Senate, Jonathan M. Gitlin reports that:

"the bit that apparently galled O'Dowd into action is the fact that Tesla owners are testing beta versions of the FSD software on public roads.
...
O'Dowd and the Dawn Project claim that every eight minutes, a Tesla running FSD commits a critical driving error—making contact with an object, disobeying traffic signs or signals, disobeying safety personnel or vehicles, or making dangerous maneuvers that cause others to have to take evasive action. O'Dowd's campaign also claims that safety defects in FSD cause malfunctions about once every 36 minutes in city driving."

David. said...

The subhead of Max Chafkin's Elon Musk’s 420-Degree Edgelord Pivot Is Getting Stale sums it up:

"The CEO’s incessant posting may do wonders for his ego and currency in right-wing circles, but it has destroyed value pretty much everywhere else."

David. said...

Edward Niedermeyer wrote the book on Tesla and in When Elon Musk Dreams, His Employees Have Nightmares he doesn;t hold back:

"For those of us who have followed Mr. Musk’s antics for some time, the latest twist in his bid for the social media platform is entirely in character. The way that he has managed and marketed his businesses from Tesla’s early days reveals a dysfunction behind the automaker’s veneer of technofuturism and past stock market successes. Often announcing new features without consultation with his team, he forces his employees to bridge the enormous gap between technological reality and his dreams. This disconnect fosters a negligent and sometimes cruel workplace, to disastrous effect."

David. said...

Niedermeyer's When I First Saw Elon Musk for Who He Is is also a good read.

David. said...

David Gura's Can the SEC stand up to the richest man on the planet? concludes:

"Even if the SEC doesn't bring charges against Musk, the Tesla CEO is pushing boundaries and testing norms in a way that we haven't seen before, according to lawyer Marc Fagel, who used to run the SEC's San Francisco Regional Office.

He highlights a recent back-and-forth on Twitter between Musk and Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal.

What started out as a substantive exchange about how the social media company counts its users ended with Musk posting a poop emoji.
...
That particular tweet didn't lead to a dramatic move in Twitter's stock price, but several of Musk's other tweets have, including one in which he declared his deal for the company was "temporarily on hold."

Musk seems to have figured out something, Fagel says. In this new world, using the social media platform that Musk is trying to buy, you can mess with markets and it "doesn't really rise to the level of fraud."

Sure, that can hurt investors, but under current law, the SEC can't do much."

David. said...

Cade Metz points out the obvious in How Safe Are Systems Like Tesla’s Autopilot? No One Knows:

"Tesla has not provided data that would allow a comparison of Autopilot’s safety on the same kinds of roads. Neither have other carmakers that offer similar systems.

Autopilot has been on public roads since 2015. General Motors introduced Super Cruise in 2017, and Ford Motor brought out BlueCruise last year. But publicly available data that reliably measures the safety of these technologies is scant. American drivers — whether using these systems or sharing the road with them — are effectively guinea pigs in an experiment whose results have not yet been revealed."

David. said...

In Tesla investigation deepens after more than a dozen US ‘Autopilot’ crashes Lauren Aratani reports that:

"The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said on Thursday it was upgrading its preliminary investigation, which launched last August, to an “engineering analysis”, which is taken before the agency determines a recall.

The investigation covers all four Tesla vehicles – Models Y, X, S and 3 – representing about 830,000 vehicles that have been sold in the US."

And:

"NHTSA, in a separate investigation, is looking into a separate batch of complaints that have been filed against Tesla vehicles that suddenly brake at high speeds, otherwise known as “phantom braking”. The agency has received more than 750 complaints relating to the problem, though there have been no crashes or injuries reported. The agency has asked Tesla for more information about its awareness of the issue."

David. said...

Elon Musk says:

"Solving Full Self-Driving...is really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money and being worth basically zero."

It is not actually zero, since they do make cars, but TSLA's current PE of 94.5 is unsustainable. It would be unsustainable even if FSD worked.

David. said...

Tesla's Bitcoin stash has a problem:

"The value of the 43,200 bitcoins that the group has on its balance sheet is now only $968.103 million, according to Bitcoin Treasuries. Tesla has already lost around $530 million. It would therefore make sense for the vehicle maker to announce a depreciation charge related to this digital asset at least when announcing its second-quarter results in July."

David. said...

Reinforcing Musk's commitment to free speech (for billionaires only) SpaceX fired the employees who wrote a letter critical of Musk.

It seems to be a pattern that when rich snowflakes find their companies under stress, their reaction is to stifle dissent. Jesse Powell of the Kraken cryptocurrency exchange provides another example.

And an investor sued Musk, Tesla and SpaceX for pumping Dogecoin:

"The plaintiff in this suit seems to use those tweets and Musk’s own references to himself as the “Dogefather” as proof that Musk has been controlling the cryptocurrency and is liable for damages among investors who have lost money as the cryptocurrency has tumbled from its high of nearly $0.74 to just over $0.05 in recent days.

The complaint calls for triple the damages of $86 billion, which is how much the plaintiff alleges has been lost by Dogecoin investors since Musk first started tweeting about it."

David. said...

Jon Brodkin's Lawsuit: Tesla broke US law by not providing 60-day notice before mass layoff reveals that:

"A lawsuit filed by laid-off Tesla workers accused the company of violating federal law by failing to provide notice before the layoffs and said the former employees are entitled to 60 days of pay and benefits. Tesla's actions violated the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, claimed the lawsuit filed Sunday in US District Court for the Western District of Texas."

David. said...

Tesla faces new probes into motorbike deaths, false advertising by Jonathan M. Gitlin brings the news:

"Tesla went into the weekend with a fresh pair of headaches. On Friday, the Associated Press reported that the federal government is investigating whether or not the company's Autopilot system can safely recognize motorcyclists after a pair of fatal crashes in July. And the Los Angeles Times reported that California is unhappy with the way the automaker has advertised its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving driver assist technologies."

David. said...

Tesla Full Self-Driving fails to notice child-sized objects in testing by Brandon Vigliarolo reports that:

"The latest version of Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) beta has a bit of a kink: it doesn't appear to notice child-sized objects in its path, according to a campaign group.

In tests performed by The Dawn Project using a Tesla Model 3 equipped with FSD version 10.12.2 (the latest, released June 1), the vehicle was given 120 yards (110 meters) of straight track between two rows of cones with a child-sized mannequin at the end.

The group says the "test driver's hands were never on the wheel." Crucially, Tesla says even FSD is not a fully autonomous system: it's a super-cruise-control program with various features, such as auto lane changing and automated steering. You're supposed to keep your hands on the wheel and be able to take over at any time.

Traveling at approximately 25mph (about 40kph), the Tesla hit the dummy each time."

David. said...

Rebecca Heilweil's Missing parts, long waits, and a dead mouse: The perils of getting a Tesla fixed includes a collection of Tesla service horror stories:

"A brand-new Model 3 delivered in desperate need of repair, due to a faulty computer, an inoperable wireless phone charger, and a missing USB port. A supposedly fixed Tesla returned unfixed, and with something spilled on the car, damaging the paint. A dead mouse and rat poison discovered in a Tesla’s front trunk after a trip to the local service center.
...
The complaints point to all sorts of problems with the experience of owning a Tesla vehicle, including an inadequate number of service centers, limited stock of replacement parts, bad communication, poor manufacturing quality, and long wait times for repair appointments."

The fundamental problem is Tesla's focus on shipping product at all costs:

"Tesla’s manufacturing output has historically increased at a significantly higher rate than the number of Tesla service centers, which, again, the vast majority of current Tesla owners rely on. The number of cars Tesla produced grew 68 percent in the first quarter of this year, compared to the same quarter last year, but the number of store and service locations grew by only 20 percent. Meanwhile, Tesla’s mobile service fleet — this is made up of Tesla mechanics that travel to a location of the customer’s choosing to complete repairs — grew by 35 percent."

This can't be a real problem because:

"Tesla even says that it “designs every Tesla vehicle with the goal of eliminating the need for service.”"

So that's all right, then. But:

"Among car owners who do need service, however, Tesla drivers tend to visit service centers at nearly the same rate as the owners of premium gas-powered vehicles, such as Lexus or Audi, according to data the consumer research firm J.D. Power shared with Recode."

David. said...

Malathi Nayak's Tesla’s Autopilot Heads to Trial discusses the forthcoming trial about the driver who was killed when Autopilot failed to see a semi-trailer blocking the road:

"A court in Palm Beach County has set a February date for a jury to hear testimony on who was at fault, the first of potentially dozens of Autopilot collision trials. Until then, expect the Twittersphere to light up with passionate arguments over a question that’s been debated for years: Does the very name Autopilot lull drivers into a false sense of security that their cars will drive themselves?"

Well Duh! Of course it does.

David. said...

To be fair, it isn't just Tesla's self-driving system that is problematic. Despite being restricted to night-time hours in San Francisco, Thomas Claiburn reports that City isn't keen on 5,000 erratic, traffic-jam-causing GM robo-cars on its streets:

"Between May 29, 2022 and September 5, 2022, there have been 28 calls to emergency services associated with Cruise AVs, the letter says, though it's unclear whether any of these are duplicates. Also, there have been an additional 20 reports about Cruise AVs spotted on social media. The agencies assume this represents "a fraction of actual travel lane road failures" because few people are on the streets to observe malfunctions during the hours Cruise operates – 10pm to 6am.

While the exact number of incidents involving Cruise self-driving cars since autonomous operation began in June isn't clear, the robotaxis have been spotted failing and delaying traffic in San Francisco."

David. said...

Molly White's Elon Musk's texts reveal his ideas for a blockchain-based Twitter reveals Musk reviving Adam Back's 1997 "Hashcash" proposal:

" "I have an idea for a blockchain social media system that does both payments and short text messages/links like twitter. You have to pay a tiny amount to register your message on the chain, which will cut out the vast majority of spam and bots. There is no throat to choke, so free speech is guaranteed." In another message, to the president of his Boring Company, Musk narrowed in on an amount: 0.1 Doge per tweet or retweet. At today's prices, at 0.1 Doge per tweet, 1¢ would buy you about 160 tweets."

White is appropriately skeptical:

"Musk's idea that there is some magical amount of money that ordinary people are willing to pay to send out a tweet or a retweet, but that spammers are not willing to pay to spam, seems preposterous. And given that "free speech is guaranteed" and blockchains are immutable, he would really need to hope that he finds this amount, because otherwise there's going to be a lot of spam permanently stored on Web3 Twitter."

David. said...

Benj Edwards reports on Musk's continuing efforts to gaslight people about his companies' technologies in Tesla shows off unfinished humanoid robot prototypes at AI Day 2022:

"at Tesla's "AI Day" event, Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled an early prototype of its Optimus humanoid robot, which emerged from behind a curtain, walked around, waved, and "raised the roof" with its hands to the beat of techno music.

It was a risky reveal for the prototype, which seemed somewhat unsteady on its feet. "Literally the first time the robot has operated without a tether was on stage tonight," said Musk. Shortly afterward, three Tesla employees rolled a sleeker-looking Optimus model supported by a stand onto the stage that could not yet stand on its own. It waved and lifted its legs. Later, it slumped over while Musk spoke."

No comment on whether the robot can drive a car without running over babies in the road.

David. said...

From the "I wonder why no-one thought of that before?" department comes Alya Shandra's What’s wrong with Elon Musk’s tweet on Ukraine:

"Elon Musk thinks he found an easy solution to Russia’s war against Ukraine: for Ukraine to, essentially, surrender. Here are six reasons why that is wrong."

Clearly, because he's the world's second richest man after Vladimir Putin he knows how to solve problems Putin can't.

David. said...

Max Chafkin follows his must-read takedown of the sel-driving hype with The Twitter Deal Has Pierced Elon Musk’s Reality Distortion Field:

"Whatever happens, the Twitter adventure has cost him more than the $25 billion or so he’ll have to pay out of pocket as part of the transaction. It’s damaged his credibility and punctured the reality distortion field in a way that years of missteps and unforced errors could not.
...
If Musk is finally finding out some rules do apply to him, it’s because the Twitter acquisition exposed his vanity and lack of imagination. With hundreds of billions of dollars to his name, a Rolodex full of presidents and potentates, and a reputation unmatched by pretty much anyone alive today, this is the best he could do? Whether or not Musk is forced to buy Twitter and whatever the price he pays, he’s never looked smaller. The magic is gone."

David. said...

David Shephardson reports that Many U.S. drivers treat partially automated cars as self-driving -study:

"Drivers using advanced driver assistance systems like Tesla Autopilot or General Motors Super Cruise often treat their vehicles as fully self-driving despite warnings, a new study has found.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), an industry funded group that prods automakers to make safer vehicles, said on Tuesday a survey found regular users of Super Cruise, Nissan/Infiniti ProPILOT Assist and Tesla Autopilot "said they were more likely to perform non-driving-related activities like eating or texting while using their partial automation systems than while driving unassisted."

The IIHS study of 600 active users found 53% of Super Cruise, 42% of Autopilot and 12% of ProPILOT Assist owners "said that they were comfortable treating their vehicles as fully self-driving."

About 40% of users of Autopilot and Super Cruise - two systems with lockout features for failing to pay attention - reported systems had at some point switched off while they were driving and would not reactivate."

Well, Duh! What has Elon been telling them all this time?

This is putting not just these idiots but all of us at risk and it needs to be stopped.

David. said...

Matt Stoller tweets:

"Elon Musk suggests handing Taiwan over to the Chinese government, immediately gets tax break from the Chinese government."

Alex Marquardt report that Musk’s SpaceX says it can no longer pay for critical satellite services in Ukraine, asks Pentagon to pick up the tab.

David. said...

Jonathan Gitlin's Feds open criminal investigation into Tesla Autopilot claims reports this:

"Reuters reports that "Justice Department prosecutors in Washington and San Francisco are examining whether Tesla misled consumers, investors and regulators by making unsupported claims about its driver assistance technology's capabilities," the sources said."

But also this:

"It's yet one more Autopilot-related headache for Tesla. In August, we learned that NHTSA is investigating whether Autopilot can see motorcyclists. The investigation came after a pair of fatal incidents where Tesla drivers hit and killed riders while using the assist mode. A separate NHTSA investigation is underway after at least 11 incidents where Teslas operating under Autopilot have hit emergency vehicles, and a third seeks to determine if the removal of forward-looking radar sensors from the EVs is the cause of hundreds of phantom braking events.

If that wasn't enough, California's Department of Motor Vehicles has also filed complaints with the state's Office of Administrative Hearings. As with the DoJ investigation, the California DMV is also upset with Tesla's misleading statements over its "FSD" feature"

David. said...

Other companies are figuring out that autonomous cars are not even close, as Jonathan Gitlin reports in Argo AI will cease operations as Ford and Volkswagen pull investments:

"The world of autonomous driving took a big blow on Wednesday with the sudden news that Argo AI will shut down. The high-profile startup had deep pockets courtesy of large investments from Ford and then Volkswagen Group, but both automakers are pulling back those resources to apply them to other problems like advanced driver assistance systems."

David. said...

Thom Dunn's Your car's automated safety features are probably making driving less safe points to David Zipper's Don’t expect your car’s safety technology to save you:

"David Harkey, the head of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), is not impressed by what he has seen so far. “Partial automation systems may make long drives seem like less of a burden, but there is no evidence that they make driving safer,” he said in an IIHS blog post. “In fact, the opposite may be the case if systems lack adequate safeguards,” a reference to those all-important driver monitoring systems.
...
a study by the IIHS found that the use of adaptive cruise control increased the share of drivers who broke the speed limit by 18 percent, and San Jose State researchers concluded that ADAS-equipped cars were more likely to crash into pedestrians or cyclists. These findings align with the Peltzman effect’s predicted shift toward unsafe driving, with those outside the vehicle bearing disproportionate risk. Such dangers could be exacerbated by drivers who overestimate ADAS’s capabilities, as more than half of Cadillac Super Cruise users seem to do, according to a recent IIHS study."

David. said...

Jesus Diaz eviscerates an idea about as stupid as, but less expensive than, buying Twitter for several times what it is worth in Elon Musk just built the Hyperloop’s grave:

"Today—after more than a billion dollars of investment burned by nine startups and Musk himself—the only loops you can do where Musk’s Hyperloop once stood are donuts. The test loop has reportedly been turned into a parking lot, an unintended memorial to a terrible idea.
...
The idea itself was slammed in countless rebuttals—ranging from astrophysicist critique to political punditry—which rightly predicted it was practically doomed from the start. There were even papers debunking the science myths behind Musk’s idea."

David. said...

The Current Affairs interview with Edward Niedermeyer entitled Exposing the Fraudulence of Elon Musk and Tesla is a must-read. He is the author of Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors. From the interview:

"People such as Walter Wong and Josh Brown have died. The Tesla fans blame them. And Tesla basically says, These people chose to be distracted. They chose to operate the system in a place we told them isn’t necessarily safe for it. Therefore, it’s all on them. And the NTSB said, No. We know from literally decades of behavioral psychology—particularly those that look at safety critical systems and partial automation—that if you put someone in what’s called a vigilance task, where they’re just monitoring this automation, and they just have to be there to jump in and take over when something goes wrong, which over time gets more and more rare, it is not a question of good drivers doing okay and bad drivers doing poorly. It’s not the same as driving. It’s a task fundamentally different from driving. It’s one that we as humans are actually less well evolved to do than unassisted driving. There’s no moral or skill factor in this. Inevitably, every human who is put in that position will eventually, given enough time, become inattentive, then given enough time, the system will find something it can’t deal with."

David. said...

Rachel Lerman and Cat Zakrzewski report on the next step in the Twitterpocalypse in Elon Musk’s first big Twitter product paused after fake accounts spread:

"Twitter on Thursday night pressed pause on Elon Musk’s first major product launch — a paid-for blue check mark — after misinformation flooded the site.

Twitter rolled out Twitter Blue on Wednesday, letting users who provided an Apple ID and a phone number pay $7.99 a month to attain verification. Previously, that badge was only available to people when the company had verified their identity, often public figures and brands.

Almost immediately, users started taking advantage of the new tool. Accounts were created impersonating politicians including President Biden and celebrities, as well as other notable people. Several also surfaced purporting to be brands, announcing fake news."

Here is one of my favorites.

David. said...

Brandon Vigliarolo report sthat Tesla reports two more fatal Autopilot accidents to the NHTSA:

"Tesla's automated driver assistance system (ADAS) is coming under fire again, with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reporting two new fatal Tesla accidents in its monthly ADAS crash report.

Since mandatory reporting began in June 2021, the NHTSA has recorded 18 fatal accidents it said involved ADAS systems. All but one report involved a Tesla.
...
Looking at the total number of ADAS crash reports submitted in the past year, Tesla dominates, although this is likely linked to the fact that there are more ADAS-equipped Teslas on the road than other vehicles. The Associated Press has previously claimed Tesla's crash rate per 1,000 vehicles is "substantially higher than the corresponding numbers for other automakers," although it didn't give further detail.

Musk's car company has submitted 474 ADAS crash reports to the NHTSA, while the next closest manufacturer, Honda, has reported 107 accidents."

David. said...

@CapitolHunters has a thread (unroll) with evidence showing:

"Elon Musk has lied for 27 years about his credentials. He does not have a BS in Physics, or any technical field. Did not get into a PhD program. Dropped out in 1995 & was illegal. Later, investors quietly arranged a diploma - but not in science."

David. said...

@tompettyflacko celebrates the release of Tesla's "Full Self-Driving" by pointing out that 11 hours after Musk announced the release a Tesla behaving erratically caused a pile-up in the Bay Bridge tunnel that injured 16 people. You can't fit 16 people in a Tesla, so many of the injured were collateral damage from Musk testing this bogus technology on public roads.

David. said...

Who are they kidding? Russ Mitchell reports that Tesla says its self-driving technology may be a ‘failure’ — but not fraud:

"The electric car company is facing a class-action lawsuit from Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology customers. They claim they were ripped off, duped by statements from co-founder and CEO Elon Musk and marketing materials from Tesla over the past six years suggesting full-fledged autonomous driving was imminent. No Tesla on the road today is capable of full self driving, and yet Tesla sells what it calls a Full Self-Driving Capability for $15,000."

Just to take one example of the fraud:

"a 2016 video that purports to show a Tesla driving itself through the streets of Palo Alto with complete autonomy. Before the video rolls, with the Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black” as background music, a message reads, “The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not driving anything. The car is driving itself.”

Tesla workers later revealed that the video was fabricated, done in multiple takes, with the driving systems failures removed, including a crash into a fence. The video remains on Tesla’s website."

David. said...

Jonathan M. Gitlin's Eight-car Thanksgiving pileup blamed on Tesla “Full Self-Driving” software reports on the continuing cost to innocent bystanders of Musk's testing buggy software on the public roads:

"An eight-car collision on Thanksgiving Day (Nov. 24) is now being blamed on Tesla's "Full Self-Driving" (FSD) assistance system. The crash took place in the Bay Area in California on I-80 and left one person hospitalized and eight others with minor injuries.

According to Reuters, a California Highway Patrol report on the incident says that a Tesla Model S traveling on I-80 at 55 mph crossed several lanes of traffic and then slowed abruptly to just 20 mph, at which point it triggered the crash as other cars still traveling at highway speed had no chance to avoid the slow-moving electric vehicle.

Reuters says that the driver blamed the crash on the controversial "Full Self-Driving" system, which he claimed "malfunctioned but police were unable to determine if the software was in operation or if his statement was accurate."

In fact, it seems that the police may not be able to clear that up."

Right. Like Tesla is ever going to admit that their software caused an 8-car pile-up.

David. said...

Ken Klipperstein's SURVEILLANCE FOOTAGE OF TESLA CRASH ON SF’S BAY BRIDGE HOURS AFTER ELON MUSK ANNOUNCES “SELF-DRIVING” FEATURE has video of the crash and details, including:

"NHTSA is also investigating a tweet by Musk in which he said that “Full Self-Driving” users would soon be given the option to turn off reminder notifications for drivers to keep their hands on the steering wheel. “Users with more than 10,000 miles on FSD Beta should be given the option to turn off the steering nag,” a Twitter user posted on New Year’s Eve, tagging Musk.

“Agreed, update coming in Jan,” Musk replied."

David. said...

Tesla video promoting self-driving was staged, engineer testifies by Hyunjoo Jin starts:

"A 2016 video that Tesla used to promote its self-driving technology was staged to show capabilities like stopping at a red light and accelerating at a green light that the system did not have, according to testimony by a senior engineer.

The video, which remains archived on Tesla’s website, was released in October 2016 and promoted on Twitter by Chief Executive Elon Musk as evidence that “Tesla drives itself.”

But the Model X was not driving itself with technology Tesla had deployed, Ashok Elluswamy, director of Autopilot software at Tesla, said in the transcript of a July deposition taken as evidence in a lawsuit against Tesla for a 2018 fatal crash involving a former Apple engineer."

David. said...

Consumer Reports calls Ford’s automated driving tech much better than Tesla’s by Peter Valdes-Dapena starts:

"Tesla’s Autopilot, which at its core combines lane keeping assist with traffic aware cruise control to help guide a car down a highway, was once groundbreaking technology.

But today more than half of new vehicles are available with similar advanced driver assistance systems, or ADAS. And in a recent ranking by Consumer Reports, which tested ADAS from 12 different carmakers, Tesla’s ranked seventh.

The best such system, according to Consumer Reports, is Ford’s BlueCruise."

Why? Because it has a proper driver monitoring system, among other reasons.

David. said...

Molly White reports that Tesla lost $140 million trading Bitcoin in 2022:

"Tesla sold most of its Bitcoin in Q2 2022, following the grand crypto tradition of buying high and selling low.

Now, according to SEC filings, Tesla suffered a net loss of $140 million in 2022 thanks to the gamble. Their reported $64 million in trading profits were eclipsed by their $204 million loss. Tesla still holds somewhere around 11,000 BTC."

David. said...

Rima Sabina Aouf reports that MIT study finds huge carbon cost to self-driving cars:

"The widespread adoption of self-driving cars will create a major bump in carbon emissions without changes to their design, a study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has found.

The study found that with a mass global takeup of autonomous vehicles, the powerful onboard computers needed to run them could generate as many greenhouse gas emissions as all the data centres in operation today."

David. said...

WOz doesn't mince words about "Full Self-Driving":

"Wozniak said his life has been based on total honesty, a description he believes can't be applied to Musk. "A lot of honesty disappears when you look at Elon Musk and Tesla," Wozniak said. "They have robbed my family, myself and my wife, of so much money [...] with things they said that we really believed would be real."

Wozniak was referring to the Tesla vehicle he upgraded in 2016—when Tesla first offered Full Self-Driving (FSD) in beta—after Musk said the car would be able to drive itself across the country by end of that year.

Wozniak and his wife then spent $50,000 on another vehicle upgrade with eight cameras and more sensors, which the CEO said would allow it to drive coast to coast without driver intervention by the end of 2017. But Woz says the car's self-driving abilities are still far from what Musk promised. "It makes mistakes all the time," he said. "It's a horrible, frightening experience."

David. said...

A totally inadequate response from NHTSA detailed in Tesla Recalls More Than 362,000 Cars Due to Self-Driving Crash Risk by Keith Laing, Sean O'Kane and Dana Hull:

"Tesla Inc. is recalling hundreds of thousands of vehicles after US authorities said its automated-driving technology could increase the risk of a crash.

The automaker’s so-called Full Self-Driving Beta system “may allow the vehicle to act unsafe around intersections,” including traveling straight through from a turn lane and proceeding through steady-yellow traffic lights, according to a filing Thursday with the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The system’s errors “increase the risk of a collision if the driver does not intervene,” the filing said."

David. said...

This keeps happening. Gabe Lehman reports that Tesla driver dies after crashing into fire truck parked on Bay Area highway:

"The driver of a Tesla has died after crashing into a parked fire truck on Interstate 680 near Walnut Creek, according to the Contra Costa Fire Department.

The driver of the Tesla was pronounced dead at the scene. A passenger was rushed to a nearby hospital with “major injuries.”

Four firefighters were inside the fire truck when it was struck. All four were taken to the hospital for evaluation although it does not appear any of them suffered major injuries. KRON4 reported that all four firefighters had their seatbelts on when the crash occurred."

David. said...

Grace Kay reports on an interview with Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard in Tesla cofounder calls Autopilot and FSD software 'crap' that could risk the carmaker's future:

"Elon Musk has made autonomous driving a top priority at Tesla, but one of the carmaker's original founders doesn't approve.

"In my opinion, we need to get out of the habit of thinking about all of this autonomous stuff as being connected to EVs. They're separate," Martin Eberhard, a cofounder of Tesla, told Insider. "I'd like to see people thinking about making cars that people can drive."

Eberhard, who Musk ousted as CEO of Tesla in 2007, said creating software for the electric cars to drive themselves was the least of his concerns when he was at Tesla.
...
All current Tesla models come with the carmaker's Autopilot driver-assist program. Tesla owners can also buy the company's Full Self-Driving beta feature for $15,000 or through a $199 monthly subscription. The beta feature enables the vehicle to automatically change lanes, enter and exit highways, recognize stop signs and traffic lights, and park. Both programs still require a licensed driver to monitor the system at all times, and Tesla's AI system collects driver data to improve the system as drivers use it. As of December, over 285,000 people had bought the feature.

Over the past few years, Tesla has come under increased scrutiny from regulators over the self-driving software and the company's marketing of the services. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating Autopilot and its potential connection to several accidents."

David. said...

Rachel Levy and Marisa Taylor report on yet another of Elon Musk's attempts to bend reality to his hype in U.S. regulators rejected Elon Musk’s bid to test brain chips in humans, citing safety risks:

"On at least four occasions since 2019, Elon Musk has predicted that his medical device company, Neuralink, would soon start human trials of a revolutionary brain implant to treat intractable conditions such as paralysis and blindness.

Yet the company, founded in 2016, didn’t seek permission from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) until early 2022 – and the agency rejected the application, seven current and former employees told Reuters.

The rejection has not been previously reported. In explaining the decision to Neuralink, the agency outlined dozens of issues the company must address before human testing, a critical milestone on the path to final product approval, the staffers said. The agency’s major safety concerns involved the device’s lithium battery; the potential for the implant’s tiny wires to migrate to other areas of the brain; and questions over whether and how the device can be removed without damaging brain tissue, the employees said."

Musk is still throwing out ludicrous predictions:

"A year after the rejection, Neuralink is still working through the agency’s concerns. Three staffers said they were skeptical the company could quickly resolve the issues – despite Musk’s latest prediction at a Nov. 30 presentation that the company would secure FDA human-trial approval this spring."

He needs to start firing the engineers - that is sure to speed things up.

David. said...

Rick Clough explains why you need "Full Self-Driving" in Tesla Under Investigation After Steering Wheels Fall Off While Driving:

"Tesla Inc. is under investigation by US regulators over complaints the steering wheel can fall off certain new Model Y vehicles while they’re in use.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it’s aware of two incidents in which the wheel detached from the steering column while drivers were operating the 2023 model year SUVs."

David. said...

Faiz Siddiqui's How Elon Musk knocked Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ off course is a long-read account of the state of Tesla's Fake Self Driving project:

"In interviews, former Tesla employees who worked on Tesla’s driver-assistance software attributed the company’s troubles to the rapid pace of development, cost-cutting measures like Musk’s decision to eliminate radar — which strayed from industry practice — and other problems unique to Tesla.

They said Musk’s erratic leadership style also played a role, forcing them to work at a breakneck pace to develop the technology and to push it out to the public before it was ready. Some said they are worried that, even today, the software is not safe to be used on public roads. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution."

A system that repeatedly runs into parked emergency vehicles clearly isn't "safe to be used on public roads", let alone all the other problems. As a driver and bike rider in an area saturated with Teslas, Elon Musk's blatant lies put me at risk of life and limb every day. Why can't the regulators do their jobs?

David. said...

Elon Musk’s Global Empire Has Made Him a Burning Problem for Washington by Saleha Mohsin, Daniel Flatley and Jennifer Jacobs contains a telling note:

"One US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of discussing Musk publicly, described Tesla as a Chinese company with an American subsidiary. The company’s factory in Shanghai accounted for more than half of its global production last year."

David. said...

Roque Planas writes in Elon Musk’s Company Plans To Dump Wastewater In This Texas River — And Locals Have Concerns:

"Musk’s Boring Company plans to discharge up to 142,000 gallons of wastewater into the Colorado River and across an on-site spray field each day, and dozens of the controversial billionaire’s new neighbors raised concerns at a packed public comment hearing Tuesday night."

David. said...

I had a personal experience with Tesla's Fake Self Driving. We are eastbound on the Dumbarton Bridge, just past the toll plaza, in the middle lane. Ahead in the middle lane is a Kia, and fairly close ahead of that a Tesla Model 3. Ahead of them the road is clear for a long way. Traffic is approaching to overtake in both the left and right lanes. Suddenly, the Tesla brakes very hard down to under 20mph, forcing the Kia to brake very hard and protest with its horn, and me to brake hard. I wait for the traffic in the left lane to pass, signal and overtake the Kia and Tesla. As we pass we see the Tesla driver is looking down and does not appear to have hands on the wheel. Had the Kia been a little closer to the Tesla this would have been a rear-end collision. The road ahead of the Tesla was completely clear, there was no reason to slow, let alone brake hard.

David. said...

Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars by Steve Stecklow, Waylon Cunningham and Hyunjoo Jin reports that:

"But between 2019 and 2022, groups of Tesla employees privately shared via an internal messaging system sometimes highly invasive videos and images recorded by customers’ car cameras, according to interviews by Reuters with nine former employees.

Some of the recordings caught Tesla customers in embarrassing situations. One ex-employee described a video of a man approaching a vehicle completely naked.

Also shared: crashes and road-rage incidents. One crash video in 2021 showed a Tesla driving at high speed in a residential area hitting a child riding a bike, according to another ex-employee. The child flew in one direction, the bike in another. The video spread around a Tesla office in San Mateo, California, via private one-on-one chats, “like wildfire,” the ex-employee said."

David. said...

The TL;DR of Mark Sumner's A Starship Post-mortem: Why the giant rocket failed and why it's Elon Musk's fault is:

"- The no-clamps slow throttle-up meant Starship stayed on the pad for a long time, throwing up concrete, rock, and sand all directions, damaging the pad, nearby facilities, and Starship itself.
- By the time it left the pad, that debris had already destroyed three of Starship’s engines and likely damaged valves and systems that would lead to additional engine failures as well as an incorrect fuel mixture.
- Starship was slow to reach every point in the flight plan, suggesting that other engines were not able to throttle up to compensate for the lost engines.
- At what should have been stage separation, either software errors or more smashed hardware kept the main booster firing long after it should have shut down.
- The result was an uncontrolled spin that required Starship to be destroyed."

The photos of damage to the pad, the yellow color of the exhaust, and the fact that at least three engines were out before it cleared the tower are pretty convincing evidence.

Musk's estimate that the next flight will be in 1-2 months is likely to be a typical Musk fantasy, given the cascade of rocks and concrete that landed outside the Space-X base, and the damage to helium and fuel tanks.

Sumner writes:

"The parts for a water deluge were actually on site, ready to install, but Musk decided to forego that installation—likely so he could enjoy the pun of launching his super-joint on 4/20. Which was something Musk had joked about doing months ago.

Hopefully he enjoyed the joke, because the EPA and FAA are going to be thinking long and hard before they authorize another flight from Boca Chica."

David. said...

Jn Brodkin reports that Judge slams Tesla for claiming Musk quotes captured on video may be deepfakes:

"The judge overseeing a wrongful death lawsuit involving Tesla's Autopilot system rejected Tesla's claim that videos of CEO Elon Musk's public statements might be deepfakes.

Tesla's deepfake claim "is deeply troubling to the Court," Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Evette Pennypacker wrote in a tentative ruling this week. "Their position is that because Mr. Musk is famous and might be more of a target for deep fakes, his public statements are immune. In other words, Mr. Musk, and others in his position, can simply say whatever they like in the public domain, then hide behind the potential for their recorded statements being a deep fake to avoid taking ownership of what they did actually say and do. The Court is unwilling to set such a precedent by condoning Tesla's approach here."

Plaintiffs want Tesla to admit the authenticity of various statements Musk made about the self-driving capabilities in Tesla cars. Pennypacker's tentative ruling ordered Musk to be interviewed for a deposition at which plaintiffs can ask whether he made the statements."

David. said...

The world's second-richest man must be a financial genius, right? Not so much.

1) Andrew Dickson dissects Tesla's finances in The trouble with making Tesla’s economics work at any cost:

"Despite sequential price cuts of approximately 10-15 per cent, deliveries only grew by 6 per cent sequentially. In fact, Tesla actually overproduced in the quarter, growing inventories. An implied price elasticity of much less than 1.0 was evidence that price changes, whether big or small, had very little effect on demand.
...
I estimate that the profit per vehicle likely dropped from circa $15,000 last year to just above $7,500. In other words, here was a price cut of approximately 12.5 per cent and profits almost halved."

2) Matt Binder reports that More than half of Twitter Blue's earliest subscribers are no longer subscribed:

"Since Musk's version of the subscription service launched last November, Twitter has only been able to convert around 640,000 Twitter users into paying Twitter Blue subscribers as of the end of April, as Mashable reported earlier this week.

While those numbers are lackluster, an even more telling detail about Twitter Blue is just how many of its earliest subscribers have canceled their subscriptions.

Out of about 150,000 early subscribers to Twitter Blue, just around 68,157 have stuck around and maintained a paid subscription as of April 30. Subscriptions are $8 per month – $11 on mobile."

So as well as driving away 70% of his advertisers he's made Twitter Blue something people actively resist.


Mike Masnick reports that Even The People Who Were Eager To Pay Elon Musk $8/Month Are Cancelling Their Blue Subscriptions:

"

David. said...

Ashley Belanger reports that US senators call Tesla’s safety review a “sham,” demand answers from Musk:

"US senators sent a letter Monday to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, saying they were "incredibly troubled" by reports that Tesla uses arbitration clauses in consumer and employee contracts to evade public accountability for rampant workplace discrimination and shocking vehicle safety flaws.

"We are deeply concerned that the arbitration agreements you impose on your workers and consumers have kept these reportedly deplorable and discriminatory conditions and potential safety flaws from the public eye and limited regulatory authorities’ ability to protect Tesla customers and employees and hold Tesla publicly accountable," the lawmakers wrote."

David. said...

Dana Hull reports that Musk is desperate to push Fake Self-Driving in Musk Would Compound Tesla Automated-Driving Risk With Free Trial:

"Musk tweeted this week that all Tesla cars in North America will get complimentary access to software marketed as Full Self-Driving, or FSD, once it’s “super smooth.” This is the same set of driver-support features the company recalled earlier this year after several meetings with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which raised concerns about Teslas traveling in unlawful or unpredictable ways.

FSD is part of Autopilot, which NHTSA also happens to be scrutinizing via two separate investigations into possible defects. The Justice Department has asked for documents related to both Autopilot and FSD. California’s Department of Motor Vehicles has accused the company of misleading consumers, and both a customer and investor have sued in proposed class actions since September."

Musk is still pushing the fantasy that, as Sean O'Kane and Craig Trudell report, Elon Musk Is Willing to Bet Tesla’s Profits on a Driverless Dream:

"Musk said on a conference call last week that Tesla has the wherewithal to sell cars at “zero profit” and then earn immense sums later off driverless software.

The trouble with that for investors? His predictions since at least 2019 that autonomous Teslas are just around the corner haven’t panned out.

“We’re the only ones making cars that technically we could sell for zero profit for now, and then yield actually tremendous economics in the future through autonomy,” Musk said April 19."

Only the fanboys will pay $15K for driver assistance software mislabeled as "Full Self-Driving" that is so much worse than the competition's driver assistance software that it can kill you.

David. said...

Jonathan M. Gitlin reports that Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” sees pedestrian, chooses not to slow down:

"Tesla released a new version of its controversial "Full Self-Driving Beta" software last month. Among the updates in version 11.4 are new algorithms determining the car's behavior around pedestrians. But alarmingly, a video posted to Twitter over the weekend shows that although the Tesla system can see pedestrians crossing the road, a Tesla can choose not to stop or even slow down as it drives past.
...
The version 11.4 update in April was supposed to improve how the cars behaved, but there's now more evidence that the FSD Beta still leads to Teslas breaking traffic laws. Section 7 of California's Driver's Handbook, which deals with laws and rules of the road, says that pedestrians are considered vulnerable road users and that "pedestrians have the right-of-way in marked or unmarked crosswalks. If there is a limit line before the crosswalk, stop at the limit line and allow pedestrians to cross the street."

This is not the first time Tesla's software has been programmed to break traffic laws, either."

This was absolutely both illegal and dangerous behavior, demonstrating yet again Tesla's disregard for the dangers to which its irresponsible testing of buggy software imposes on innocent bystanders. The cult member's gleeful tweet emphasizes the attitude of "who cares, I'm having fun".

David. said...

In Huge Tesla leak reveals thousands of safety concerns, privacy problems Jonathan M. Gitlin reports on a 100GB leak to Handelsblatt:

"More than 2,400 complaints allege sudden unintended acceleration problems. ... More than 1,500 complaints allege problems braking, including 139 cases of phantom braking and 383 cases of phantom stops. ... Handelsblatt says there were more than 1,000 crashes linked to brake problems and more than 3,000 entries where customers reported safety concerns with the driver assists.
...
Beyond the customer complaints, the data leak also shows how Tesla responded to these problems—by committing to as little as possible in writing.
...
Customers that Handelsblatt spoke to have the impression that Tesla employees avoid written communication. "They never sent emails, everything was always oral," says the doctor from California, whose Tesla said it accelerated on its own in the fall of 2021 and crashed into two concrete pillars."

David. said...

The Wapo's Editorial Board gets some of the problem in Tesla’s ‘self-driving’ cars can’t drive themselves. That’s a problem.:

"“Unequivocally safer.” This is how Tesla CEO Elon Musk has described his company’s Autopilot capability — yet the data suggests that some equivocation might be in order.

A Post investigation reveals that the number of deaths and serious injuries associated with Tesla’s driver-assistance technology is greater than previously reported. The most recent accounting by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration includes 736 crashes since 2019, at least 17 of them fatal. The statistics have surged since last spring, as more vehicles with these systems have rolled onto the country’s roadways. The figures involve both Autopilot, which allows cars to cruise highways without human intervention, and the newer Full Self-Driving feature, which introduces automaton to city and residential streets."

David. said...

From the "I wonder why this keeps happening" department comes Jon Brodkin's Tesla on Autopilot crashed into stopped truck during highway lane closure:

"A Tesla vehicle being operated on Autopilot mode crashed into a stopped truck that was providing traffic control for a highway lane closure on Friday night, according to Pennsylvania State Police.

David Clough, 18, was behind the wheel of a 2016 Tesla while traveling eastbound on I-76 in Plum when he "lost control" due to the car being on Tesla's Autopilot mode, according to a crash report issued by the State Police. Clough was cited for careless driving.
...
"I don't think that something should be called, for example, an Autopilot, when the fine print says you need to have your hands on the wheel and eyes on the road at all times," [Transportation Secretary Pete] Buttigieg told the AP."

David. said...

In Twitter bug causes self-DDOS tied to Elon Musk’s emergency blocks and rate limits: “It’s amateur hour” Andy Baio reports on Sheldon Chang's diagnosis:

"This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself.

The Twitter home feed’s been down for most of this morning. Even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops trying and trying.

In the first video, notice the error message that I’m being rate limited. Then notice the jiggling scrollbar on the right.

The second video shows why it’s jiggling. Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon’s latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in.

This likely created some hellish conditions that the engineers never envisioned and so we get this comedy of errors resulting in the most epic of self-owns, the self-DDOS."

David. said...

Lora Kolodny reports that NHTSA presses Tesla for more records in Autopilot safety probe:

"If Tesla fails to supply the federal agency with information about its advanced driver assistance systems, which are marketed as Autopilot, Full Self-Driving and FSD Beta options in the U.S., the company faces “civil penalties of up to $26,315 per violation per day,” with a maximum of $131,564,183 for a related series of daily violations, according to the NHTSA.
...
Among other details, the federal vehicle safety authority wants information on which versions of Tesla’s software, hardware and other components have been installed in each car that was sold, leased or in use in the U.S. from model years 2014 to 2023, as well as the date when any Tesla vehicle was “admitted into the ‘Full-Self Driving beta’ program.”"

David. said...

Andy Kalmowitz' Feds Thinking About Maybe Regulating Autonomous Vehicles reports that:

"Lawmakers in Washington are reportedly looking to reignite much-delayed legislation on the safe and regulated adoption of self-driving vehicles. According to Reuters, a congressional hearing is now scheduled for July 26. That panel will consider separate draft legislation from Republican Representative Bob Latta and Democratic Representative Debbie Dingell."

And the response is a marketing blitz documented by David Zipper in The Safety Dance:

"It is a cynical but savvy move for AV companies to focus on safety as their core lobbying pitch, instead of on other options like convenience or access for those unable to drive. Unlike more realistic road-safety strategies like slowing down urban traffic, self-driving technology does not threaten the primacy of the automobile in American life, which many public officials are wary of challenging. In fact, overhyping the safety benefits of self-driving cars allows the auto industry to concurrently fulfill two key objectives: It positions car companies as a solution to a American safety crisis they themselves helped create, and it serves as a distraction from proven tactics (like road diets or transit expansions) that make their cars and tech less useful in urban areas. And they have little to lose by exaggerating AV benefits; past promises of car-dominated utopias have repeatedly come to naught without inspiring a regulatory smackdown or popular backlash."

David. said...

Sharon Feldman reports that Fed’s deadline comes and goes without Tesla’s reply to Autopilot questions:

"On July 3, 2023, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration made public a letter it sent Tesla in August 2022, demanding that the company provide updated responses to some questions. NHTSA is investigating the performance of Tesla's Autopilot driver assistance system after identifying more than a dozen crashes in which Tesla vehicles struck stopped emergency vehicles. The agency is also investigating whether Tesla vehicles adequately ensure drivers are paying attention when using the Autopilot system.

Following a string of notable crashes, NHTSA officially initiated an investigation into Tesla's Autopilot system. And on July 3, NHTSA wrote to Tesla again, asking the automaker for updated information by July 19. As far as anyone can tell, that didn't happen."

David. said...

Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu report that Tesla created secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints:

"About a decade ago, Tesla rigged the dashboard readouts in its electric cars to provide “rosy” projections of how far owners can drive before needing to recharge, a source told Reuters. The automaker last year became so inundated with driving-range complaints that it created a special team to cancel owners’ service appointments."

Alexandre Ponsin complained and:

"received two text messages, telling him that “remote diagnostics” had determined his battery was fine, and then: “We would like to cancel your visit.”
...
The Austin, Texas-based electric carmaker deployed the team because its service centers were inundated with appointments from owners who had expected better performance based on the company’s advertised estimates and the projections displayed by the in-dash range meters of the cars themselves, according to several people familiar with the matter."

David. said...

Bloomberg's Tom Randall, Jeremy Diamond and Dean Halford have a three-part Tesla Survey 2023:

- Tesla Owners Have Soured on Elon Musk, But Still Love Their Model 3s
- Tesla’s Model 3 Still Holds Up After Five Years of Hard Charging
- Tesla’s Test Drivers Share What Musk Gets Right and Wrong

The last is the most interesting:

"In the first major survey of more than 2,000 FSD Beta testers, we asked how it performed in different driving situations. Stop signs and stop lights were rarely a problem, they reported, but construction zones, uncontrolled intersections and responding to emergency vehicles were serious concerns.
...
"FSD Beta is like my 15-year-old with her learners permit. You never know what it might do or why."
...
FSD Beta testers had mixed reviews of the product overall. Some said it improved their safety with proper oversight. Others strongly disagreed. The general consensus was that FSD isn’t yet reliable enough for the average driver."

Making money from your Tesla robo-taxi is still a long way off.

David. said...

‘SHUT IT OFF!!’ Disruptive new ‘X’ logo removed in San Francisco by Max Hoppenstedt and Trisha Thadani is the latest example of Musk's disregard for the law:

"Construction crews dismantled a giant “X” sign atop the downtown building where the company formerly known as Twitter has its headquarters Monday, after residents here complained of a bright flashing light that disturbed them throughout the night.
...
At the weekend, a city building inspector tried twice to gain access to the new rooftop sign, according to the city’s complaint tracker. Representatives of the company refused to let the inspector in, allegedly telling the official that the structure “is a temporary lighted sign for an event,” the complaint said. The inspector explained to on-site X representatives that the structure must be removed or abide by city code."

David. said...

Mary L. Cummings' WHAT SELF-DRIVING CARS TELL US ABOUT AI RISKS is full of examples of self-driving failures, including:

"There was the October 2021 crash of a Pony.ai driverless car into a sign, the April 2022 crash of a TuSimple tractor trailer into a concrete barrier, the June 2022 crash of a Cruise robotaxi that suddenly stopped while making a left turn, and the March 2023 crash of another Cruise car that rear-ended a bus.
...
In May 2022, for instance, the NHTSA sent a letter to Tesla noting that the agency had received 758 complaints about phantom braking in Model 3 and Y cars. This past May, the German publication Handelsblatt reported on 1,500 complaints of braking issues with Tesla vehicles, as well as 2,400 complaints of sudden acceleration. It now appears that self-driving cars experience roughly twice the rate of rear-end collisions as do cars driven by people."

As someone who has experienced a Tesla "phantom braking" incident, I now make sure I'm a long way back if the car in front is a Tesla.

David. said...

Heather Tal Murphy reports on Musk's brand in Elon Musk Is Finally Cracking Tesla’s Invincibility Shield:

"A Bloomberg poll found that 21.5 percent of early Tesla adopters who ditched the brand did so because they disapproved of Musk. This was the primary reason that any of the 5,000 drivers surveyed replaced a Tesla with a different kind of vehicle. Many told Bloomberg they were particularly irked by Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter, which he has since renamed X, and to the tweets that followed. It wasn’t only the outrageous one-liners he spewed and fights he picked that bothered them. Some were also put off by the way the billionaire seemed to be downplaying the consequences of climate change. Where Musk was once plausibly eclectic in his politics and beliefs, the Twitter-era CEO was now behaving like a far-right activist sipping from a poisoned information well."

David. said...

Ariana Bindman reports on yet another self-driving car fatality in Injured person reportedly dies after Cruise cars block first responders:

"On Aug. 14, two stalled Cruise vehicles delayed an ambulance from leaving the scene of a crash in which a driver had hit a pedestrian with their car, according to reports from the San Francisco Fire Department. The pedestrian later died of their injuries, which first responders linked to the delay in getting them to the hospital."

David. said...

Timothy B Lee asks Are self-driving cars already safer than human drivers?. He reviewed the crash reports from Waymo's and Cruise's autonomous taxi services in San Francisco and writes as regards Waymo:

"First, other vehicles ran into Waymos 28 times, compared to just four times a Waymo ran into another vehicle (and Waymo says its vehicle got cut off in two of these cases). Second, Waymo was only involved in three or four “serious” crashes, and none of them appear to have been Waymo’s fault.

This is impressive because these statistics reflect more than 2 million miles of driving ... The National Highway Traffic Safety Board estimates that there are around 6 million car crashes reported to the police each year. Americans drive around 3 trillion miles per year, so roughly speaking, a “major” crash occurs on the roads once every 500,000 miles."

This sounds good, and it is definitely better than Cruise:

"there are a couple areas where Cruise’s performance does not seem to be on par with Waymo.

One is significant crashes where Cruise was clearly at fault. I saw three examples of this:

- A Cruise AV mistakenly thought the vehicle ahead of it was starting to turn left. The Cruise ran into the other vehicle when it turned right instead.
- A Cruise AV changed lanes when there wasn’t enough space to do so, cutting off another vehicle and leading to a crash.
- A Cruise AV ran into the back of a city bus. Cruise subsequently determined that its software got confused because it was an articulated bus (the kind with an accordion joint in the middle) and Cruise’s software couldn’t handle two parts of a vehicle moving in slightly different directions."

But the comparison with human drivers is misleading, as I discussed in Autonowashing. The self-driving cars are much more modern than the average of the US fleet, and are operating at low speeds on city streets. The average mile driven by humans is at much higher speed where an accident is much more likely to be rated serious.

The argument that self-driving technology will save lives requires showing three things:

- That they are less dangerous to pedestrians, since it is only pedestrians that are likely to be killed in city driving.
- That they are less dangerous to vehicle occupants, since they are the likely victims in high-speed accidents.
- That they are less dangerous to first responders (see Tesla's Fake Self-Driving).

No amount of experience with autonomous taxis in San Francisco can show this, so Lee's article's claims may be relevant to the insurance industry but they aren't relevant to the idea that self-driving saves lives.

David. said...

Believing anything Musk says isn't a good idea as Jon Brodkin reports in SpaceX projected 20 million Starlink users by 2022—it ended up with 1 million:

"SpaceX's Starlink division hasn't come close to meeting customer and revenue projections that the company shared with investors before building the satellite network, according to a Wall Street Journal report published today.

A 2015 presentation that "SpaceX used to raise money from investors" reportedly projected that in 2022, Starlink would hit 20 million subscribers and generate nearly $12 billion in revenue and $7 billion in operating profit. The WSJ said it obtained the 2015 presentation and recent documents with numbers on Starlink's actual performance in 2022."

David. said...

Sean Hollister's Police won’t fine Elon Musk for illegally livestreaming while driving demonstrates yet again Musk's disregard for other's safety:

"When Elon Musk livestreamed a drive through Palo Alto, California on Friday afternoon, he was holding his phone — which is plainly and clearly illegal under California law. But the Palo Alto Police Department won’t be issuing a fine, it tells The Verge, because police didn’t witness the crime themselves.
...
There's no question that Musk was in control of the vehicle: he was forced to stop his "Full Self Driving" system from running a red light partway through the livestream, and he reveals that he's in the drivers seat by turning the camera on himself near the 30-minute mark."

David. said...

Is Tesla liable if a driver dies on Autopilot? Juries will now decide by Trisha Thadani reports on the first of many cases:

"Tesla faced a jury Thursday over the role its Autopilot features may have played in a calamitous 2019 crash here, among the first in a string of cases involving the technology that will be litigated around the country in the coming months.
...
Thursday’s trial concerns the death of 37-year-old Micah Lee, who was allegedly using Autopilot features in his Tesla Model 3 while driving his family down a highway at 65 miles per hour. Suddenly, court documents say, the car jerked off the road, crashed into a palm tree and burst into flames. Lee died from injuries suffered in the collision, while his fiancée and her son were severely injured.

Lee’s estate sued Tesla, alleging that the company knew its assisted-driving technology and enhanced safety features were defective when it sold the car. The plaintiff’s case also rests heavy on the claim that Tesla markets its Autopilot features in a way that misleads drivers into believing it is more autonomous than it actually is."

David. said...

Karl Bode's Feds Probing Tesla For Lying About EV Ranges, Bullshitting Customers Who Complained reports on today's second problem for Musk:

"Tesla’s routine misrepresentation of their product (and almost joyous gaslighting of their paying customers) has caught the eye of federal regulators, who are now investigating the company for fraudulent behavior:

federal prosecutors have opened a probe into Tesla’s alleged range-exaggerating scheme, which involved rigging its cars’ software to show an inflated range projection that would then abruptly switch to an accurate projection once the battery dipped below 50% charged. Tesla also reportedly created an entire secret “diversion team” to dissuade customers who had noticed the problem from scheduling service center appointments.

This pretty clearly meets the threshold definition of “unfair and deceptive” under the FTC Act, so this shouldn’t be that hard of a case. Of course, whether it results in any sort of meaningful penalties or fines is another matter entirely. It’s very clear Musk historically hasn’t been very worried about what’s left of the U.S. regulatory and consumer protection apparatus holding him accountable for… anything."

David. said...

Anumita Kaur's Tesla workers faced slurs, racist graffiti and retaliation, federal suit says reports on the third problem du jour:

"Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company Tesla allowed racial harassment of its Black employees to run rampant at its Fremont, Calif., plant and retaliated against some workers who complained, the federal agency charged with enforcing civil rights laws alleged in a lawsuit Thursday."

The behavior isn't news:

"The lawsuit is the latest in a series of allegations blasting the billionaire’s workplace environments — the Justice Department sued SpaceX, also owned by Musk, last month, alleging the company discriminated against refugees and asylum seekers in its hiring process. Half a dozen women sued Tesla in 2021, arguing that the company fostered a culture of sexual harassment. That same year, a federal court in California ordered Tesla to pay nearly $137 million in damages after an employee said they encountered racist abuse at Tesla’s Fremont site. The Fremont plant faced scrutiny again last year, when the state’s workplace regulator sued Tesla over similar claims of racial discrimination and harassment."
"

David. said...

Ben Bergman tweeted:

'“Everybody deserves to speak their opinion,” @lindayaX says after being asked about ADL complaints about Twitter/X antisemitism.

Then she looks at her watch and says she has to catch a flight.

You literally can’t make this stuff up. pic.twitter.com/wCQe9FRotz

— Ben Bergman (@thebenbergman) September 28, 2023'

For context, see The Chief Embarrassment Officer of X (Formerly Twitter) by Nitish Pahwa. The subhead is "Linda Yaccarino keeps being humiliated on Elon Musk’s behalf".

David. said...

Today's Musk Menace is from Ashley Berlanger's College student sues Musk for falsely calling him a “psyop” in neo-Nazi brawl:

"On Wednesday, a Los Angeles-based 22-year-old college graduate, Ben Brody, sued Elon Musk for more than $1 million. Brody's lawsuit alleged that over a series of social media posts, the X (formerly Twitter) owner falsely identified Brody—described as a "shy young man"—as a participant "in a violent street brawl on behalf of a neo-Nazi extremist group" near Portland, Oregon, this summer.

Perhaps even worse, according to Brody's complaint, one of Musk's X posts also allegedly amplified conspiracy theories that "Ben Brody’s alleged participation in the extremist brawl meant the incident was probably a 'false flag' operation to deceive the American public."
...
Since Musk's posts, Brody's complaint said that he has suffered emotional distress, "including difficulty sleeping, panic attacks, headaches, and fatigue which disrupted his daily life and severely impacted his sense of wellbeing." He also alleged that he and his family have been "repeatedly doxed and suffered an enormous wave of harassment from belligerent strangers." For Brody, gaining a false reputation for "donning neo-Nazi regalia" at the brawl is especially horrifying, "given his Jewish heritage," his lawsuit said,"

David. said...

In Musk refused to testify in Twitter stock probe, claimed SEC is harassing him Jon Brodkin reports that:

"The US Securities and Exchange Commission sued Elon Musk yesterday, alleging that he refuses to appear for testimony in an investigation into whether he violated federal law with his purchases of Twitter stock. The SEC asked a federal court to force Musk to testify "as required by the investigative subpoena."

"The subpoena with which Musk failed to comply relates to an ongoing nonpublic investigation by the SEC regarding whether, among other things, Musk violated various provisions of the federal securities laws in connection with (1) his 2022 purchases of Twitter stock, and (2) his 2022 statements and SEC filings relating to Twitter," the SEC alleged in its lawsuit in US District Court for the Northern District of California."

David. said...

Dan Robinson reports that SpaceX accused of paying less to women and minority engineers:

"Specifically, Foltz claims she was hired as a Propulsion Engineer on a team of all male engineers for a salary of $92,000, while her colleagues with similar or less experience were paid up to $115,000.

The court filing says this came to light when a California law came into force requiring salary ranges to be listed on all advertised job openings, and this revealed the band for Foltz's role was $95,000 to $115,000, meaning she was being paid less than the starting salary.

In response, SpaceX was forced to increase her salary, but the lawsuit claims the company then only raised her pay to $95,000, the minimum threshold of her pay band."

David. said...

Sean O'Kane reports that Tesla Says DOJ Is Probing Personal Benefits Violations, Vehicle Range:

"Tesla Inc. says it has received requests for information and subpoenas from the US Department of Justice related to potential personal benefits violations, the advertised range of its vehicles and personnel decisions.
...
The Wall Street Journal in September reported that federal prosecutors are investigating perks provided to Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk going back as far back as 2017, including a project described as a glass house for Musk. Earlier this year, Reuters reported that Tesla had created a special “diversions team” to avoid dealing with complaints from customers about their vehicle ranges.
...
The DOJ is also investigating claims Tesla has made about its purported self-driving technology. In September, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Tesla alleging that it has been “tolerating widespread and ongoing racial harassment of its Black employees” at its Fremont, California, plant."

David. said...

Ashley Belanger's Judge mocks X for “vapid” argument in Musk’s hate speech lawsuit notes Judge Breyer's acerbic questioning:

"X's lawyer, Jon Hawk, argued that when the CCDH joined Twitter in 2019, the group agreed to terms of service that noted those terms could change. So when Musk purchased Twitter and updated rules to reinstate accounts spreading hate speech, the CCDH should have been able to foresee those changes in terms and therefore anticipate that any reporting on spikes in hate speech would cause financial losses.

“What you have to tell me is, why is it foreseeable?” Breyer said. “That they should have understood that, at the time they entered the terms of service, that Twitter would then change its policy and allow this type of material to be disseminated?

"That, of course, reduces foreseeability to one of the most vapid extensions of law I've ever heard," Breyer added. "‘Oh, what’s foreseeable is that things can change, and therefore, if there’s a change, it’s 'foreseeable.’ I mean, that argument is truly remarkable."

According to NPR, Breyer suggested that X was trying to "shoehorn" its legal theory by using language from a breach of contract claim, when what the company actually appeared to be alleging was defamation."