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Elon Musk: Officially a fraud and piece of shit. Official or unofficial war criminal?


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7 minutes ago, Gene Parmesan said:

I don't know when the cyber truck will ever come to fruition, or what it will cost, but I would buy it or pretty much anything over a lightning if it's affordable.  Because right now an XLT trim level lightning with extended range is an 80k truck, and XLT is not a premium trim.

What in Tesla's history makes you think the cybertruck is going to be less expensive than a Ford? 

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7 minutes ago, Gene Parmesan said:

I don't know when the cyber truck will ever come to fruition, or what it will cost, but I would buy it or pretty much anything over a lightning if it's affordable.  Because right now an XLT trim level lightning with extended range is an 80k truck, and XLT is not a premium trim.

bad news for you. when it was announced here were the cybertruck prices:

Quote

The Cybertruck’s $39,900 base price would have applied to the single motor, rear-wheel-drive model only. The dual-motor AWD version of the truck was set to be priced from $49,900, while the range-topping tri-motor version started at $69,900.

a couple of places now are expecting it to now start at about $50 and following the prior pricing that would me it ends up being about $50k, $60k and $80k

and boy howdy if you think you are getting premium trim in any TSLA-backed vehicle you have bad news coming.

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10 minutes ago, Gene Parmesan said:

I don't know when the cyber truck will ever come to fruition, or what it will cost, but I would buy it or pretty much anything over a lightning if it's affordable.  Because right now an XLT trim level lightning with extended range is an 80k truck, and XLT is not a premium trim.

 

The Lightning is high, no doubt.  But the Cybertruck, if it ever goes on sale, will not be cheap.  There's many reasons no one in the auto industry uses stainless steel for body construction, for example.  

 

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6 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

 

The Lightning is high, no doubt.  But the Cybertruck, if it ever goes on sale, will not be cheap.  There's many reasons no one in the auto industry uses stainless steel for body construction, for example.  

 

More so just bashing the lightning pricing then trying to defend tesla.  The lightning is not a realistic option for most of the population.  It runs 20-30k more than their ICE F150 counterpart.  I just meant I'd buy the first practical option whether it's an ugly ass cybertruk or any other make.

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1 hour ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

I'm thinking the person that named this Cybertruck is not much different than the person that uttered that magic phrase "your meme game is strong"

Major League Baseball Sport GIF by MLB

3 hours ago, Lurch said:

I’ve got to believe at some point singular smart roads will make more sense than various smart vehicles.

There was some decent work done 15 or 20 years ago in California in terms of self-driving (may have been Stanford or CalTech or something), where it would be confined to certain lanes, the cars all talked to each other, and the roads had sensors/markers built in to them, so the cars would be working almost like a train, with various cars peeling out of a formation of sorts as they got closer to their destination.  It was rough, but it showed an awareness of the strengths of such a project.  These cars were traveling close together though, for fuel economy/speed (think drafting in NASCAR).

But Elon is gonna do it with cameras alone.

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I know news cycles move faster than ever these days but it was like a month ago that a Tesla engineer admitted in a deposition that the video hosted on Tesla's own website of "autopilot" navigating the quiet residential streets of one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Silicon Valley had to be faked because auto pilot is an unreliable piece of shit even on quiet 30 mph streets early on a weekend morning when traffic was at its lightest.

Quote

But a senior engineer now says the footage was staged, Reuters reported Tuesday.

The news service cited a deposition from Ashok Elluswamy, the company's director of Autopilot software, that was taken as part of a lawsuit over a driver's 2018 death in a Tesla.

"The intent of the video was not to accurately portray what was available for customers in 2016. It was to portray what was possible to build into the system," Elluswamy said, according to a transcript of his deposition cited by Reuters.

Elluswamy said the car was driving a predetermined route in the video and that drivers intervened to take control during trial runs, Reuters reported. He also testified that, during attempts to show the Model X could park itself without a driver, a test car crashed into a fence in Tesla's parking lot, Reuters reported.

Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Tesla engineer says company faked "full autopilot" video: Report

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1 minute ago, Chopper said:

I know news cycles move faster than ever these days but it was like a month ago that a Tesla engineer admitted in a deposition that the video hosted Tesla's own website of "autopilot" navigating the quiet residential streets of one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Silicon Valley had to be faked because auto pilot is an unreliable piece of shit even on quiet 30 mph streets early on a weekend morning when traffic was at its lightest.

Tesla engineer says company faked "full autopilot" video: Report

See, but what you don't understand is, Tesla has, ummm....."data."

And also, the first part of the truck's name is "Cyber," so you know it has to be awesome.  As you would expect from someone who is both a free-speech absolutist and someone who fires engineers who won't make an entire website repress criticism of him while simultaneously boosting the views of his "dank memes."  DUH.  DO THE RESEARCH, SHEEPLE!

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But I've been told he hated everything about California, and would move everything to Texas ASAP

 

https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/22/23610766/tesla-california-engineering-headquarters-elon-musk

 

Quote

Tesla announced a new engineering headquarters in California, saying it would take over office space in Palo Alto formerly occupied by Hewlett Packard. Tesla CEO Elon Musk made the announcement Wednesday alongside California Governor Gavin Newsom (D), who called the announcement “another proof point of the renewable energy vibrancy that is California.”

 

Spoiler

Tesla was founded in San Carlos, California in 2003 and has called the state home for most of its 20 years of existence. In October 2021, the company abruptly moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas, in recognition of its new Gigafactory that was under construction in the state. Tesla also has Gigafactories in Nevada, Berlin, Buffalo, and Shanghai. 

The company continues to operate its factory in Fremont, California, outside of San Francisco. And California is one of Tesla’s largest markets in the world. But Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s relationship with the Golden State has grown increasingly shaky over the years. 

Musk previously threatened to pull Tesla’s entire operations out of California in 2020 based on his vehement disagreement with the state’s shelter-in-place orders during the height of the covid pandemic. Tesla even sued the county that the company’s California factory is in as a form of protest.

Musk himself moved to Texas toward the end of 2020, as SpaceX dramatically increased its presence in the southern tip of the state. He also said that he thought California had become too “complacent” with respect to its residents and businesses.

But Tesla has retained its presence in California. The company continues to invest in its Fremont factory and still maintains its old headquarters in Palo Alto. And California has invested in Tesla over the years, in the form of tax breaks and other taxpayer funded incentives. According to Newsom’s office, California has invested more than $3.2 billion in Tesla since 2009.

 

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4 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

But I've been told he hated everything about California, and would move everything to Texas ASAP

 

https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/22/23610766/tesla-california-engineering-headquarters-elon-musk

 

 

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Tesla was founded in San Carlos, California in 2003 and has called the state home for most of its 20 years of existence. In October 2021, the company abruptly moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas, in recognition of its new Gigafactory that was under construction in the state. Tesla also has Gigafactories in Nevada, Berlin, Buffalo, and Shanghai. 

The company continues to operate its factory in Fremont, California, outside of San Francisco. And California is one of Tesla’s largest markets in the world. But Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s relationship with the Golden State has grown increasingly shaky over the years. 

Musk previously threatened to pull Tesla’s entire operations out of California in 2020 based on his vehement disagreement with the state’s shelter-in-place orders during the height of the covid pandemic. Tesla even sued the county that the company’s California factory is in as a form of protest.

Musk himself moved to Texas toward the end of 2020, as SpaceX dramatically increased its presence in the southern tip of the state. He also said that he thought California had become too “complacent” with respect to its residents and businesses.

But Tesla has retained its presence in California. The company continues to invest in its Fremont factory and still maintains its old headquarters in Palo Alto. And California has invested in Tesla over the years, in the form of tax breaks and other taxpayer funded incentives. According to Newsom’s office, California has invested more than $3.2 billion in Tesla since 2009.

 

1501 Page Mill Road? He better not fucking touch Bill and Dave’s offices. 

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13 hours ago, MonkeyDoughnut said:

When you are like 2/3 of the market and your profit margin per car is light years ahead of your competitors it makes sense for now. They are the bully in the room that can price cut to put half the industy out of business anytime they so choose.

Have you lost your fucking mind

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19 hours ago, Captain Ron said:

 

 

When some optimistic technical nerd explains that something is possible in x time, you multiply the number by 2 and increase the unit by 1 to get a better understanding of when it might happen. Although I guess, mission accomplished if the game is expanding your wealth on a wave of credulous investors.

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38 minutes ago, Celery Man said:

When some optimistic technical nerd explains that something is possible in x time, you multiply the number by 2 and increase the unit by 1 to get a better understanding of when it might happen. Although I guess, mission accomplished if the game is expanding your wealth on a wave of credulous investors.

At this point when Musk promises ANYTHING, just assume it won't ever happen. How many things has he promised yet failed to deliver?

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36 minutes ago, Captain Ron said:

Wait for it...

 

 

the defector article onthis is great: https://defector.com/tesla-cybertruck-sorry-piece-of-crap
 

Quote

 

The Tesla Cybertruck looks like shit. That is the first thing about it. It looks like somebody should be pulling it out of a men's size-10 loafer in a shoe store in Times Square. It looks like a beard trimmer that plays Phil Collins songs. It looks like it should come free with a Sports Illustrated print subscription in 1987. Maybe it'll look better if you hit ctrl-alt-delete a few times or close WordPerfect in the background. Maybe it's just weird to see it outside of its natural environment, upright on the wall of a public restroom, dispensing paper towels.

Were the Cybertruck not so clearly intended to make a visual statement, you could shrug its ridiculous ugliness off. This is a pickup truck, you would say, in that case. A utility vehicle. Its function is not to be cool-looking. Its function is to haul stuff, possibly off-road. The problem there is that if that were true—"We got to move these refrigerators," the Cybertruck's ideal buyer might say, "we got to move these color TVs"—the Cybertruck would not look the way it does; there would be no affirmative reason to make it look like that. But still. You could imagine imagining that its appearance didn't matter.

Of course, that would require the Cybertruck to do truck stuff capably.

 

and

Quote

I don't know about you, but what I look for in a utility vehicle is all the torque and raw power of a Roomba, but without any of the gratuitous sex appeal. At least the Cybertruck's brutal looks will be sure to command the attention of all the moms in the Whole Foods parking lot as it feebly rolls back down the front of a speedbump. Maybe some of them will help push it. I'd give the Cybertruck a reassuring pat after its long trek up that hill in the video up there, if its stainless steel body panels weren't 11 million degrees Fahrenheit in the sun.

 

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10 minutes ago, Captain Ron said:

Yup. They also mentioned the taillight being out too. Probably uses some proprietary bulbs that cost $100 each.

 

 

Cadillac XLR taillights on ebay can fetch over $2000...or over $500 refurbished:

 

https://jalopnik.com/why-a-cadillac-xlr-brake-light-can-cost-more-than-a-use-1840556672

 

Quote

Some bad designs are noticeable right away, their poorly-considered executions slap you in the face like a slice of wet ham. Others are more insidious, with problems lurking stealthily under the surface. The Cadillac XLR’s taillights are an example of this latter group, and they’re causing the handful of remaining XLR owners all kinds of expensive headaches.

In case you’ve forgotten, the Cadillac XLR was essentially a Corvette in a crisply tailored Cadillac suit, and with a better interior. GM built these expensive cars from 2004 to 2009, and they had many innovations, including being Cadillac’s first car with adaptive cruise control and seats that could chill or toast your buttocks. Also, they had some fancy LED taillights.

 

rnhu5ch57juahpw5bf9y.png

 

Quote

What the hell is going on here? $2,050 to $3,495 for a freaking taillight? What are these things made of, saffron, rubies, and cocaine?

Not exactly. What they are made of are LED strips and printed circuit boards, both of which are becoming fragile and failure-prone as they age, and with a deadly combination of GM not producing replacement parts and a very repair-unfriendly design, the result is absurdly high prices for replacements.

This is especially bad because taillights are one (or, I guess usually two) of those things that, legally, you have to have working on your car to register and drive it. It’s not like the XLR owners with bad brake lights can just opt to leave it broken—if they want to keep driving their cars, they have to get these lights working, somehow.

 

Quote

XLR owner’s boards are full of owners realizing how boned they are, and frustrating attempts to find replacements. Some have attempted to repair the lights, and in doing so you can see the full depth of the terrible design decisions made when designing these lights:

 

y86fivax8mvlrhigxrvs.png

 

Spoiler

This thing is like an object-lesson in how not to design something you don’t want to be disposable crap. There’s no screws or fasteners to easily gain access to the internals, you have to heat up glue to 220 degrees just to get the lens off, and when you do, you’re greeted by a whole bunch of non-removable LED units and a printed circuit board with a coating on it that makes it near-impossible to repair or replace components, assuming that you even had the skills and knowledge about how to deal with dense, modern, surface-mounted semiconductor components.

What’s baffling is that this is a taillight, one of the few components remaining on modern cars where it’s expected that an owner can perform basic maintenance.

Most cars still have access panels so owners can replace failed lamps or LED units in taillights with minimal trouble, because these minor failures can lead to not being able to legally drive your car. Also, you know, safety and such.

I thought at first it should be possible to gut the internals of a broken XLR taillight and just rig up a simple set of replaceable LED units for brake, tail, turn, reverse, and side marker lamps, maybe using aluminum flashing to make a housing/reflector structure.

Doing so would assume that the wiring harness for the taillight had discreet 12V wires for the different taillight functions; however, when I look at the connector diagram, that appears not to be the case:

It looks like the connector is just sending signals to that circuit board, which has a small embedded computer to interpret those signals and translate them into whatever combination of lights is needed. I think that’s what’s going on, at least—all I can tell is that it’s not as simple as a wire per brake lamp, tail, turn, etc.

I think it might actually be cheaper and easier to just wire a whole parallel small wiring harness from the brake light switch, turn signal switch, and light switch than it would be to fuck around with any of this mess. Or maybe you could program an Arduino to read the signals and interpret them properly?

This is just ridiculous — it’s not like the taillights do any fancy LED animations or anything like that — they work pretty much like any taillight from the 1970s and up, just needlessly complicated.

I think this is worth pointing out not because we have such a huge percentage of XLR owners among our readership, but because bad design like this—specifically, owner-hostile design decisions like these—need to be called out.

These XLR owners love their cars and likely want to enjoy them as long as possible, but this needlessly complex and unserviceable design is making their lives actively worse.

Things like taillights, that are legally required and are prone to damage (they’re often right at the exposed corners of your car, highly vulnerable in case of even a minor fender-bender) need to be easy for owners to service, especially as the car ages.

Designing taillights like these, with nearly zero capability to be serviced by the owner, cheaply and easily, show actual contempt for owners by the engineers who designed them.

So, screw you, GM, and these stupid, overpriced taillights. Please don’t pull any shit like this again. And that goes for all you other automakers, too.

I’m watching you. ALL of you.

 

 

 

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55 minutes ago, NoName said:

 

The comment about the moms at the grocery store was pretty funny. I'm mostly a practical sort when it comes to vehicles. I mean, I looove the look of some sports cars, classic cars, etc but I'm not going to lay out the cash for them. But this cyber truck and what they're claiming it can do and  for what they want for it---it looks like some hobbyist tried to build a Delorean out of a fastfood cardboard drinks container. Just bleccch.

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1 hour ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

 

Cadillac XLR taillights on ebay can fetch over $2000...or over $500 refurbished:

 

https://jalopnik.com/why-a-cadillac-xlr-brake-light-can-cost-more-than-a-use-1840556672

 

 

rnhu5ch57juahpw5bf9y.png

 

 

 

y86fivax8mvlrhigxrvs.png

 

  Hide contents

This thing is like an object-lesson in how not to design something you don’t want to be disposable crap. There’s no screws or fasteners to easily gain access to the internals, you have to heat up glue to 220 degrees just to get the lens off, and when you do, you’re greeted by a whole bunch of non-removable LED units and a printed circuit board with a coating on it that makes it near-impossible to repair or replace components, assuming that you even had the skills and knowledge about how to deal with dense, modern, surface-mounted semiconductor components.

What’s baffling is that this is a taillight, one of the few components remaining on modern cars where it’s expected that an owner can perform basic maintenance.

Most cars still have access panels so owners can replace failed lamps or LED units in taillights with minimal trouble, because these minor failures can lead to not being able to legally drive your car. Also, you know, safety and such.

I thought at first it should be possible to gut the internals of a broken XLR taillight and just rig up a simple set of replaceable LED units for brake, tail, turn, reverse, and side marker lamps, maybe using aluminum flashing to make a housing/reflector structure.

Doing so would assume that the wiring harness for the taillight had discreet 12V wires for the different taillight functions; however, when I look at the connector diagram, that appears not to be the case:

It looks like the connector is just sending signals to that circuit board, which has a small embedded computer to interpret those signals and translate them into whatever combination of lights is needed. I think that’s what’s going on, at least—all I can tell is that it’s not as simple as a wire per brake lamp, tail, turn, etc.

I think it might actually be cheaper and easier to just wire a whole parallel small wiring harness from the brake light switch, turn signal switch, and light switch than it would be to fuck around with any of this mess. Or maybe you could program an Arduino to read the signals and interpret them properly?

This is just ridiculous — it’s not like the taillights do any fancy LED animations or anything like that — they work pretty much like any taillight from the 1970s and up, just needlessly complicated.

I think this is worth pointing out not because we have such a huge percentage of XLR owners among our readership, but because bad design like this—specifically, owner-hostile design decisions like these—need to be called out.

These XLR owners love their cars and likely want to enjoy them as long as possible, but this needlessly complex and unserviceable design is making their lives actively worse.

Things like taillights, that are legally required and are prone to damage (they’re often right at the exposed corners of your car, highly vulnerable in case of even a minor fender-bender) need to be easy for owners to service, especially as the car ages.

Designing taillights like these, with nearly zero capability to be serviced by the owner, cheaply and easily, show actual contempt for owners by the engineers who designed them.

So, screw you, GM, and these stupid, overpriced taillights. Please don’t pull any shit like this again. And that goes for all you other automakers, too.

I’m watching you. ALL of you.

 

 

 

Holy shit.  I owned a V1 for a decade, and most everything was pretty simple…cheap as shit that broke regularly…but no dumbass design like I’d expect in an Italian car.  Sure the taillight flew off on 45 toll, I replaced half the sensors in the damn car, and catalytic converters were unobtanium, but everything came apart with a Phillips or Torx.  
 

Always wanted an XLR, even knowing they were problematic.  Wonder what other gremlins lie within.  

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1 hour ago, Homercles said:

Holy shit.  I owned a V1 for a decade, and most everything was pretty simple…cheap as shit that broke regularly…but no dumbass design like I’d expect in an Italian car.  Sure the taillight flew off on 45 toll, I replaced half the sensors in the damn car, and catalytic converters were unobtanium, but everything came apart with a Phillips or Torx.  
 

Always wanted an XLR, even knowing they were problematic.  Wonder what other gremlins lie within.  

 

Our treasurer at work drives one; she only drives it in the spring/fall when she can put the top down.  Rest of the year, she drives a 2-3 year old Tahoe.

She says it has never given her any issues; it's a pretty car (hers is a 2009, I think).  I told her that if she was ever going to get rid of it, she might re-think it and sell off parts; then told her about the article I quoted.  

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3 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

 

Our treasurer at work drives one; she only drives it in the spring/fall when she can put the top down.  Rest of the year, she drives a 2-3 year old Tahoe.

She says it has never given her any issues; it's a pretty car (hers is a 2009, I think).  I told her that if she was ever going to get rid of it, she might re-think it and sell off parts; then told her about the article I quoted.  

Shit she should sell it while everything still works.  

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Quote

 

On Wednesday, Twitter employees had the tech equivalent of a snow day: the company’s Slack instance was down for “routine maintenance,” they were told, and the company was implementing a deployment freeze as a result.

That same day, Jira – a tool Twitter uses to track everything from progress on feature updates to regulatory compliance – also stopped working. With no way to chat and no code to ship, most engineers took the day off. 

Jira access was restored on Thursday. But Platformer can now confirm that Slack wasn’t down for “routine maintenance.” “There is no such thing as routine maintenance. That’s bullshit,” a current Slack employee told us.

In this as in so many other things, Twitter hasn’t paid its Slack bill. But that’s not why Slack went down: someone at Twitter manually shut off access, we’re told.

 

https://www.platformer.news/p/new-cracks-emerge-in-elon-musks-twitter

 

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"The Tesla Cybertruck looks like shit. That is the first thing about it. It looks like somebody should be pulling it out of a men's size-10 loafer in a shoe store in Times Square. It looks like a beard trimmer that plays Phil Collins songs. It looks like it should come free with a Sports Illustrated print subscription in 1987. Maybe it'll look better if you hit ctrl-alt-delete a few times or close WordPerfect in the background. Maybe it's just weird to see it outside of its natural environment, upright on the wall of a public restroom, dispensing paper towels."

I love love this review.  Love it!!! 

 

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22 minutes ago, Pescado_Rojo said:

Zuck is going to end up buying twitter for about $10B and figure out how to make money with it. 

Less, but yeah.

At some point, Elmo is going to begin to hate Twitter. His ego simply won't be able to handle all of the personal failure it represents.

That's when it's going to get really awesome to watch. 

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  • immamac changed the title to Elon Musk: [Fraud] Official or unofficial piece of shit?
  • blacklab changed the title to Elon Musk: Officially a fraud and piece of shit. Official or unofficial war criminal?

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