Tesla recalls all Cybertrucks

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https://archive.is/UBQ9G

 

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Ugly vehicle

 

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Wrapping the vehicle actually destroys the surface killing any resale value

 

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Ugly vehicle

They are fukking everywhere out here on the west side…

 

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https://insideevs.com/news/750076/tesla-sales-tanking-globally/

Tesla Sales Are Tanking Across The World​

Blame the Musk Effect, declining EV subsidies or all of the above. But Tesla's global sales are off to a very bad start for 2025.​

Photo by: InsideEVs

By: Patrick George

Feb 08, at 2:00pm ET

Bitcoin, emissions credits and promises about artificial intelligence can only do so much. Like it or not, Tesla is still a car company. And Tesla's sales are not off to a great start in 2025.

In recent days, full-year and January sales results from various markets around the world indicate a bleak picture for the Elon Musk-led electric vehicle company. Even as it added the Cybertruck to its lineup in large volumes last year—which should have unlocked more buyers in America's expansive pickup truck field—Tesla is seeing serious declines in places where it once had a near-lock on electric sales. Let's take a look at some of the areas taking the hardest hits.

As various outlets covered this week, the California New Car Dealers Association's (CADA) latest data indicates that EV sales leveled off in the Golden State last year, holding steady at 25.3% of new-car sales and just slightly up from 2023's result of 25%. Granted, while it's quite impressive for one in four new cars sold in California to be entirely electric, a slowdown in once-rapid EV growth has coincided with a big decline in Tesla sales.

Their report doesn't mince words. "All of the decrease in the state market last year was attributable to Tesla, which had an 11.6% decline," it said. "Registrations for all other brands increased 1.4%." And that's for all new passenger vehicle registrations in California, not just EVs.

Photo by: InsideEVs

The new Tesla Model Y will be released globally in March. Can it help reverse these sales declines?

Toyota, Tesla, Honda, Ford, and Chevrolet were the market-share leaders in California last year, and the Tesla Model Y kept its "best-selling light truck" crown. Yet California saw almost 30,000 fewer Model 3 registrations compared to 2023. The Model Y fared better, but was still down more than 4,000 units. The Cybertruck was California's top-selling electric truck, but cracked a mere 9,019 registrations—not quite what you'd expect in an affluent, EV-friendly market and the one where Tesla was born. That was only 434 registrations off the aging and expensive Tesla Model X, for example.

The story gets worse in other parts of the world. In Germany, where Tesla was the longtime EV sales leader even as new entries from Volkswagen, BMW, Audi and various Chinese brands started showing up, sales declined a whole 60% in January—just 1,277 registrations in Europe's biggest car market, according to Fortune. Tesla’s sales were also down 63% in France in January, another large car market, from a year earlier. They also dropped 8% in the UK year-over-year in January even as all-electric vehicle sales rose to 21% of the British new car market, a seven-point increase from 2024. "No Tesla cracked the UK's top 10 best-seller list last month, something that has regularly happened in the past," Ars Technica reported this week.

And one trend that's especially worth watching is what's happening in China, which makes up more than a third of Tesla's global sales. In China, which leads the world in total all-electric and hybrid sales, Tesla dropped 11.5% in January.

There are a few things that should be taken into account for these sales declines. Tesla once dominated EV sales but new competitors are showing up left and right, including in areas where Tesla doesn't play, like three-row SUVs. In China, sales often slow around the Lunar New Year holiday festivities and Tesla also implemented factory upgrades at its Gigafactory Shanghai plant to build the updated "Juniper" Model Y. And in several European markets, EV sales have been uneven or outright declined as various countries ended their subsidy programs; as a result, there are now calls for EU-wide subsidies that would promote growth across the entire bloc to counter new imports from China.

But one factor feels inescapable at this point: the backlash to Elon Musk's increased involvement in politics. In the U.S., the Tesla CEO spent the past week—illegally, according to many lawyers and constitutional scholars—breaching the U.S. Treasury Department's payment systems as part of President Trump's effort to unilaterally defund various government agencies. In Germany, Musk's vocal support of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has been widely cited as a turn-off for EV buyers, and the same has been said of his politics in the UK.

Though it's hard to gauge empirically, Musk's far-right political turn does seem to be having an effect on Tesla sales—especially among the more affluent, urban progressive-to-centrist buyers traditionally more inclined to buy EVs in many places. A recent report from the nonpartisan EV Politics Project indicates that Tesla and Musk are losing support among EV intenders and Democratic-leaning buyers faster than they're gaining support from people on the other side of the political spectrum, who tend to be less interested in EVs. In other words, Musk is losing Tesla sales ground with the traditional EV base, and not making it up with any of his new supporters.

Photo by: InsideEVs

EV Politics Project Slide

"Republicans are creeping toward greater EV acceptance and willing or not, Elon’s journey to MAGA may have helped that," the group said in its latest report. "Meanwhile, the Elon-driven Tesla headwinds problem among non-Republican consumers is clearly growing."

Though Tesla's stock surged after the election, attributed to investor faith in Musk's close relationship with Trump being able to help clear hurdles for goals like autonomous car deployment, it has sunk in recent days due to these dismal sales reports.

The biggest thing to watch this year may be the release of the updated Model Y. In theory, a big refresh for the world's best-selling EV (and by some metrics, best-selling car, period) should jump-start sales in a major way. But if buyers are counting out the brand because of Musk, the success or failure of that car will be the ultimate barometer.

 

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Free Lot 1 on Instagram: "For those of you needing closure... Nothing like washing the dongs off your cybertruck after a long day of skiing. We’ve got a sweatshirt for the first person to send us a pic of that thing in the ditch or on top of a lands

67K likes, 65 comments - freelot1 on February 16, 2025: "For those of you needing closure... Nothing like washing the dongs off your cybertruck after a long day of skiing. We’ve got a sweatshirt for the first person to send us a pic of that thing in the ditch or on top of a landscape rock...

www.instagram.com

 

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People keep putting fake walls in front of Teslas

More semi-autonomous ACME content.

www.theverge.com

People keep putting fake walls in front of Teslas​

Another YouTuber put Tesla vehicles through a ‘Wile E. Coyote’ wall test with mixed results.

by Umar Shakir

Mar 21, 2025, 6:34 PM EDT

78 Comments

Image: Kyle Paul (YouTube)

Umar Shakir is a news writer fond of the electric vehicle lifestyle and things that plug in via USB-C. He spent over 15 years in IT support before joining The Verge.

Someone has responded to YouTuber Mark Rober’s Tesla fake wall test with a video that also tries to address the question of whether the company’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) features would detect a Wile E. Coyote-style road obstruction in the real world. Creator Kyle Paul posted his video Thursday and included two Teslas with FSD: a Model Y equipped with a HW3 computer and a Cybertruck that comes with the latest HW4 / AI4 system and cameras, Not a Tesla App reports.

In the original video, Rober, an engineer who went viral after his package thief glitter bombs videos, tested whether Tesla’s camera-based Full Self-Driving (FSD) system can automatically stop before plowing through a wall painted as a road stretching into the horizon. It didn’t, people raised (many) questions, and we tried to answer a few of them.

In Paul’s video, the Tesla Model Y with confirmed FSD (in this case, version 12.5.4.2) didn’t fare better than Rober’s — he had to manually stop the vehicle before it crashed into the fake wall that, to my human eyes, doesn’t look quite as convincing. Not all is lost for Tesla, though, as Paul’s test of the Cybertruck with FSD version 13.2.8 had a better ending. It detected the wall and slowed down to a complete stop.

You can watch both videos for yourself, whether it’s to check the science or just to take note of how many people have the means to build real-world Looney Tunes ACME walls.

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Tesla cameras versus the Wile E. Coyote test.

Can you trick a Tesla’s camera-based Autopilot system, which has been linked to hundreds of crashes, using simulated rain, fog? Will it barrel through a wall covered in an image of the road beyond, like Looney Tunes’ Wile E. Coyote slamming into the Road Runner’s fake tunnels? Yes you can...

www.theverge.com

Tesla cameras versus the Wile E. Coyote test. | The Verge​

Posted Mar 16, 2025 at 11:11 AM EDT

Tesla cameras versus the Wile E. Coyote test.

Can you trick a Tesla’s camera-based Autopilot system, which has been linked to hundreds of crashes , using simulated rain, fog? Will it barrel through a wall covered in an image of the road beyond, like Looney Tunes’ Wile E. Coyote slamming into the Road Runner’s fake tunnels?

Yes you can, according to Engineer and YouTuber Mark Rober’s testing. (Bonus: Rober also uses LiDAR to map Disney’s pitch-black Space Mountain coaster. )

Can You Fool A Self Driving Car?



Channel Info Mark Rober Subscribers: 65.8M subscribers

Description

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Full un-cut footage from the fake wall crash:

Thanks to Harrison @IndianaDrones from Rock Robotic for helping with his very cool lidar. You can check out scans from the project and a 3d tour of CrunchLabs by visiting Home | ROCK Robotic

Thanks to Luminar for allowing us to test their LiDAR-equipped car. They provided the vehicle for testing purposes, but no compensation was given, and this is not a paid promotion: Luminar

Thanks to these folks for providing some of the music in the video:
Ponder- @Pondermusic
Laura Shigihara - @supershigi
Andrew Applepie - Andrew Applepie
Blue Wednesday - Blue Wednesday
Danijel Zambo - Danijel Zambo

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Tesla whistleblower says Musk wanted to deport her team for raising brake issue - EUROPE SAYS

Former Tesla engineer Christina Balan, who was fired in 2014, said in an interview that her entire team was threatened with deportation for taking her side

www.europesays.com

Tesla whistleblower says Musk wanted to deport her team for raising brake issue​

April 20, 2025

Former Tesla engineer Christina Balan, who was fired in 2014, said in an interview that her entire team was threatened with deportation for taking her side when she brought up a brake safety issue directly to Elon Musk. She’s now succeeded in throwing out Tesla’s arbitration case against her, and hopes to meet Tesla directly in open court in a case that could influence corporate policy nationwide.

Christina Balan is a Romanian-born engineer who formerly worked for Tesla on the Model S. Her contributions were significant enough that her initials appeared on the Model S’ battery pack.

But in 2014, she brought up what she considered a safety issue directly with Elon Musk. She thought that the Model S’ floor mats could cause a brake safety issue, similar to a situation that Toyota had recently gone through (though that also led to a media firestorm that blew the issue out of proportion). She said that Tesla had chosen suppliers based on friendships, not quality.

And she brought it up directly to Musk because… he told her to. Famously, in 2013, Musk sent out an email to the entire company stating:

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Anyone at Tesla can and should email/talk to anyone else according to what they think is the fastest way to solve a problem for the benefit of the whole company. You can talk to your manager’s manager without his permission, you can talk directly to a VP in another dept, you can talk to me, you can talk to anyone without anyone else’s permission. Moreover, you should consider yourself obligated to do so until the right thing happens.

-Elon Musk, email to all Tesla employees, March 21, 2013

A few days after sending that email, Balan said she was offered a meeting with Musk, but that when she showed up to the meeting, it was instead attended by a lawyer and some large men in uniforms, and with Tesla forcing her to resign her position.

During that meeting, Balan says that Tesla’s lawyer threatened to deport many members of her team, who were currently waiting on green card applications, if she didn’t sign the resignation, seemingly in response to her team backing her up in raising these concerns. She ended up signing the resignation in protest, writing on it that “I’m resigning for the position that I was put in a month ago bc I dare to speak up to the Sr management, also bc people that had the chance to speak up were threatened…”

Balan’s initials, “CB,” on a Model S battery pack

When Balan’s case got coverage in Huffington Post in 2017, Tesla sent a statement that Balan had stolen company resources to work on a “secret” personal project (Tesla emails show that Balan was told to work on this project by leadership). After this, Balan says she faced difficulty in finding work as companies feared ending up on Musk’s blacklist.

Balan filed a defamation suit over the press statement, but Tesla forced her case into arbitration and got the defamation suit thrown out. Forced arbitration is widely used by companies in America to find faster and more corporate-friendly rulings, an approach that has only become more common after endorsement by the “Supreme” Court.

Balan then appealed that decision, and after many delays (some related to her fight against breast cancer, which is now in remission), she finally succeeded in getting the arbitration thrown out on Monday – even though she represented herself, pro se, for most of the proceedings.

Her win could be significant for corporate policy nationwide, as it could serve to chill the overuse of arbitration which is seen by most observers as giving disproportionate power to companies in labor disputes. However, given the nature of the court’s recent finding, which was found to be a jurisdictional issue, this decision may not be directly applicable to many other arbitration cases.

Now, Balan wants to face Tesla in open court with her case, and hopes to bring more of her story to the public – which she says Musk has tried to stop her from doing, despite his claims of being a “free speech absolutist.”

She said so in an interview this weekend with The Times UK, a media organization owned by climate denier Rupert Murdoch, who is also the father of James Murdoch, a Tesla boardmember.

In the interview, Balan describes working conditions under Musk, and that he was a mostly-absent CEO who only showed up to the office twice a month, would threaten or retaliate against those who tried to fix problems. She says that she wants to take her case to open court “to prove how vindictive this monster is. He’s pure evil… he’s enjoying hurting people… and you don’t know about them because he’s forcing everybody to give up their freedom of speech and their right to sue.”

You can watch the whole interview below:

Electrek’s Take

We haven’t written about Balan’s case before because it’s been such a long time coming, and filled with various arcane legal wranglings. There will likely be more steps to come, many of which are boring legal maneuvers, but perhaps this case will now have a chance to go more public now that the arbitration decision has been thrown out.

And, frankly, I think the initial complaint over floor mats was probably not all that significant of a blockbuster. At the time, floor mats were getting a lot of focus due to the high-profile nature of the Toyota case (which was also overstated), so I think Balan’s team was probably more wary than usual. And we didn’t go on to see a slate of floor mat problems with the Model S in the time since.

However, Tesla’s response to bringing up the safety issue is still unacceptable (to say the least). Not only were all employees told to take steps like this to get problems solved by the CEO himself, but the strong-arm nature of a quick firing in response, and then threatening her team with deportation is beyond the pale.

While we only have Balan’s words as evidence for the deportation threat, we have since seen Musk take vindictive actions against entire teams, and seen his anti-immigrant attitudes including the desire to deport people illegally.

Recently Musk fired the entire supercharger team, in what was probably the dumbest business decision Tesla has ever made, reportedly because Rebecca Tinucci, a star of the auto industry and the head of the most successful team in Tesla, refused to fire more people.

(Incidentally, another longtime Tesla exec who was fired at the same time as the whole Supercharger team, Daniel Ho, had previously praised Balan, saying “without creative engineers like you, this place would be just another car company”)

And Musk is also the largest financial backer of an administration that is currently illegally deporting US citizens to a prison famous for beatings, overcrowding and food deprivation that some have called a place to “dispose of people without formally applying the death penalty.”

He has spent much of his public advocacy in recent years showing racist and anti-immigrant attitudes, including support for German neo-Nazis and agreeing with a defense of Hitler’s actions in the Holocaust. He’s focused more on pushing his white supremacist views than on anything to do with EVs and climate change (which he’s now pushing denial of), thus working against Tesla’s mission.

So, making deportation threats against immigrants does not seem out of character, despite Musk being a formerly “illegal” immigrant himself.

Either way, we look forward to hearing more about this case as it goes on, in the hopes that it can both elucidate more for the public what the real Elon Musk is like, and possibly do something to reduce, ever so slightly, the abuse of the arbitration system by companies.

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trainwreck of a car and company and people still buying his trash its wild