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hubie [soylentnews.org] writes:

You're Supposed To Be Glad Your Tesla Is A Brittle Heap Of Junk [defector.com]:

Tesla cars are shoddily built pieces of shit liable to fall apart and malfunction in dangerous ways at inopportune moments. No, this is not a blog from 2012! It is also not a blog from 2015 or 2018 or 2022. It is not even a blog from two weeks ago about Tesla's self-driving systems killing people all over the place. It is a blog from today, Dec. 21, 2023.

On Wednesday, Reuters published a big, thorough investigative story [reuters.com] documenting a pattern of major parts failures on low-mileage Tesla vehicles—and Tesla's organized years-long effort to obscure the pattern and offload its costs onto drivers, so as to sustain the illusion that it is a profitable company making cars that are not piece-of-shit death traps. By "major parts failures," I should specify here that we are not talking about, like, a faulty turn signal, or an unreliable trunk latch. We are talking about stuff like a whole-ass wheel falling off of your Model 3 while it travels at highway speeds, or the suspension collapsing while you make a left turn, causing the body of the car to crunch down onto the road, or an axle half-shaft fucking snapping while you accelerate, or the power steering suddenly failing while you are zooming along at 60 miles per hour.

We are talking, in short, about engineering failures—failures that anyone would find alarming if they encountered them in a soap box derby racer made out of literally a soap box—happening, abruptly and without warning, to Tesla cars that are for all practical purposes brand new. Moreover, they're happening to lots of them, because of manufacture and assembly problems the company knew about, and hid, and lied about, and blamed on the poor suckers who bought its crappy cars.

The Reuters piece is quite long, and earns its length with an incredible wealth of damning receipts, including internal Tesla communications making clear that the company has known about its own shoddy work for a long time, even as it deceived investors, regulators, and drivers. [...]

All the upside-down incentives and warped prerogatives of the startup world are on display here (including a preference for lying and monkeying with data over actually doing good work). They're also, in turn, mere appendages of a deeper and more profound decadence. In 2023, discovery, exploration, and invention are just vibes you rent, by investing in a future-costumed effort to ignore all of what's already been learned and pretend "making a car that works" (or tunnels, or spaceships, or social media) is a new frontier. What matters isn't whether any of this has been done before, and more authentically, and well enough to be built upon—what matters is that this particular rich man-child hasn't done it yet, from scratch, for himself and for his own dream of being The Most Special Boy. In the absence of any real opportunity to envision a brighter future, you sign up to support some inheritance goober's personal fantasy camp by dumping money into his company or buying his stupid-looking car. In this way, you are meant to understand, you have participated in the great grand adventure of discovering tomorrow.

The Reuters piece: Tesla blamed drivers for failures of parts it long knew were defective [reuters.com]

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