The similarities don’t stop there. Edsel Ford famously attended a victory party to celebrate the fall of France to the Nazis in 1940.
People are torching Teslas in Europe and elsewhere
Here in Littleton Massachusetts Tesla charging stations themselves have been torched.
I know of others much closer to Boston.
Over the weekend I watched the Columbia 1943 movie Return of the Vampire, starring Bela Lugosi. It was pretty clearly intended as a sequel to the 1931 Universal movie Dracula, but since Columbia hadn’t purchased the rights to the character, they couldn’t call him “Dracula”. They needed another Eastern European name. So, possibly because of Nickola, they christened their vampire – ARMAND TESLA.
I think we should make use of this coincidence of names. It’s a hoot that Musk’s electric vehicle shares its name with a 1943 movie Vampire.
(Played by Bela Lugosi, no less.)
It’s weird none of these Tesla vandals have been caught. You’d think with the prevalence of cameras/law enforcement priorities/general stupidity of criminals, at least one person would have been caught and blasted across the news as a warning to others and yet nothing.
Makes you wonder if they just have a lot of public support backing them up and they just look the other way instead. I know I would.
Support from fascist cops? I doubt it. I think police forces around the globe are salivating at the first to catch a Tesla vandal and do their little press conferences and warn people sternly that non-state sanctioned violence is never to be tolerated.
True, I guess I was thinking more about the general public.
As for Berlin, it’s not (yet) as infected with public surveillance cameras as other metropolises. And if the Tesla arsonists are typical left-wing radicals, which is probable, they’re clever enough to mask themselves when doing their deeds.
Teslas have a feature called something like “Sentry mode” where the camera system stays alive the whole time the car is parked and records & can transmit anything the car thinks is threatening.
Anecdotally, most Tesla owners don’t activate it because it consumes battery power most would rather have for greater range. I suspect the average attitude to Sentry mode is already changing quickly in Europe, and may do so soon in the USA too.
It’s also just a matter of time before some vandal somewhere screws up and injures themselves at the scene, or their mask slips, or whatever, and the car’s recording of them destroying it will be connected to other nearby surveillance cam images and they’ll be identified.
FYI all, the vandalism related content might go better over in this other current thread:
Technically, any vehicle is going to have incidents of people dying inside, due to mechanical failures/design decisions/etc. if there are a large enough number of the vehicles on the road.
It’s whether these events are proportionally outsized for the Tesla that would matter.
I know, I know… tin foil hat time… but given that one of the ‘failed SS agents’ on the ground at the attempt was later promoted to head of the entire SS after the election… do we really know as an absolute fact that either of these wasn’t a fake attempt created/inspired to boost numbers?
( PS- If you feel your answer might put you in danger of being renditioned to El Salvador, just pretend I typed this post in a foreign language )
Shouldn’t buyers worry about the pre-heat and defrost settings on the built in tanning bed?
True, and whether this is statistically true for Teslas I do not know, but here’s what I do know for a fact (unless absolutely everything I’ve read from multiple reliable sources is false). And that is that Musk has an obsessive habit of meddling with the detailed minutiae of a car’s design, making decisions that are often whimsical, not based on sound engineering or ergonomic principles but merely reflecting what he likes. And moreover, what Musk likes is heavily biased towards the greatest possible automation and computerization, creating potential points of catastrophic failure with no backup. This suggests to me that Teslas are likely to be much more vulnerable to such failures than more normal cars with more traditional engineering and better vetted safety systems.
Given a functional government, I could easily see vehicles with normally-electric primary door releases being required to have prominently labeled e.g. bright red emergency mechanical releases. With big red or yellow arrows pointing to them. Both inside and outside the vehicle.
Like this
Note however the subjunctive aspect of that sentence.
The pushback I have to this is the FBI under Biden (who thoroughly investigated the incident) would have to go along with that scheme.
Clearly the SS agent that got promoted is someone willing to take a bullet for Trump (in Trump’s mind at least), and that’s the kind of person Trump can trust to run the SS. That seems far more likely and on brand for the Lump-in-Chief.
So you mean …
Loyalty über alles?
Sure seems like that’s the theme of the day.
“Pull handle out 9 feet”
Really 9 feet, how does that work?
The Tesla 3/Y door handles have always frustrated me. Ergonomically and aerodynamically they work great. They are an easy one-handed push-pull process. Except there is no reason they need to be electric poppers instead of just a traditional mechanical door handle. They could still have a sensor that drops the window as part of the mechanical opening process; I’m sure that could be figured out.
There already is a manual pull on the inside. The rear seat manual pull is much harder to use accidentally than the front seat ones.
At least poppers on the X make sense. They’re there for the same reason minivans have automatic sliding doors.
As to whether such things will fail early or catastrophically? Who knows. My previous VW, it would be over 20 years old now, had all kinds of sensors and computer controls all over, and they failed all the time. So far the Tesla has been more reliable, but being more reliable than an early 2000s VW is not a high bar.
I’d assume a cable, and the length is to get the rescuer a bit away from the explosive canopy ejection.
That makes a crap ton of sense. Look at this video of a canopy ejection.
I’d want to be at least 9 feet away from that.