Tesla Fail

I just want to have some fun today with a short post, and few things bring me more joy than exposing billionaires for what they are not. They're not special or better than you or I, they're not particularly hard working, intelligent or talented. They're good at one of two things; they're good at making money, or they're very lucky.

No one has done more to deconstruct the idea of a meritocracy than Elon Musk. The persistent myth that billionaires are so rich because they're just better than the rest of us has never taken so much damage than after Musk's purchase of Twitter. I'm not going to talk about that ordeal right now, as myself and many others have said enough about that. Instead I'm going to say something about Tesla. Musk has become really famous as the one who co-founded Tesla and mainstreamed electric cars. I'll give him half of that; mainstreaming electric cars is a feat we can rightfully chalk up as a genuine accomplishment of Elon Musk. With that achievement he incentivized all other car manufacturers to speed up their own development and production of hybrid and electric cars. But he's not the founder or co-founder of Tesla; Marc Tarpenning and Martin Eberhard did that.

Did you know that Tesla is the only major American auto manufacturer without a union in the United States, as well as in Germany? But maybe that's a strange complaint to be made about Tesla, because it's not just a car manufacturer; although it builds cars, and its real founders were automakers. But Tesla under Elon Musk wants to rewrite the rules of the road. Heck, Musk wants to rewrite the rules on most everything. That's why he's so beloved among his hardcore fan-base. He's the one-man-hype-machine who dreams of becoming a real life Tony Stark and doesn't shy away from using his unrealistic futurist hallucinations to boost the stocks of his companies. For Tesla the future is full self-driving cars; Musk is betting on the end of driving. There is a lively debate on whether Tesla is a car manufacturer or a tech company; Forbes even compared Tesla to Uber and Lyft as they are all companies who want to end driving as we know it and provide a new and comfortable way of transportation.

Tesla is a software company that positions itself at the forefront of the development towards full self-driving vehicles. As Uber and Lyft went public on the promise of delivering more convenient and personal transportation to all of us, here came Tesla's emblematic CEO, Elon Musk, to announce how his company would introduce "Robo-Taxis" by 2021... Of course that was just one of his many vapid promises; he even boasted that a $30,000 Robo-Taxi would make owners a profit in the first year. But just like his wild dreams about the human brain-chip interface he's developing at Neuralink, full self-driving hard- and software is a way off. Like I said, there's just something gratifying in showing how people with big mouths keep on failing at most of their boasts. So I'll leave you with a video that brought a smile on my face. It's a simple independent test that compares the self-parking function of four cars: a Tesla, a BMW, a Ford and an Audi. Now you guess which one finished last and failed at every attempt...

By the way, do yourself a favor and search the internet on the countless ways Tesla cars are failing before you consider buying one. I mean, parking, automated or not, doesn't usually create life or death situations, but there are many examples of Tesla cars making dangerous moves or even spontaneously combusting into a difficult to extinguish electric fire...

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