WOULD YOU BUY A USED (OR NEW) CAR FROM THIS MAN?

I DON’T RECALL ELON MUSK (aka “The Chainsaw Wielder”) being on any ballots. Yet he has become BBF of the guy who won by a mere 1.5 percent of the 2024 popular vote. (A show of hands of those wishing to DOGE the antiquated Electoral College.)

Image from The Guardian.

A particular bailiwick of mine has been that of automobiles. And there, according to InsideEVs, “Tesla Sales Are Tanking Across the World.” This website writes, “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.” 

I’ve even seen a photo of a Tesla with a red tie hanging out of its truck. Take that, da bodda-ya!

R&T Reports. Not to cherry-pick from a magazine I once knew (thanks, Hearst, for a surprise retirement party), Joe Kucinski recently wrote “Tesla Has the Highest Fatal Accident Rate of All Auto Brands, Study Finds.” Road & Track, November 15, 2024. He cites “a recent iSeeCars study that analyzed data from the U.S. Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS). Tesla vehicles have a fatal crash rate of 5.6 per billion miles driven, according to the study; Kia is second with a rate of 5.5, and Buick rounds out the top three with a 4.8 rate. The average fatal crash rate for all cars in the United States is 2.8 per billion vehicle miles driven.”

Kucinski quotes Karl Bauer, iSeeCars executive analyst: “The models on this list likely reflect a combination of driver behavior and driving conditions, leading to increased crashes and fatalities. A focused, alert driver, traveling at a legal or prudent speed, without being under the influence of drugs or alcohol, is the most likely to arrive safely regardless of the vehicle they’re driving.”

So much for Elon Musk’s claim that the Tesla Model 3 was “the safest car in the world,” which, by the way, prompted a cease-and-desist from the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration back in 2019.

More Recently…. Jack Ewing reports, “State Dept. Suspends Plan to Buy Armored Teslas,” The New York Times, February 13, 2025. This, for the hard-of-reading, is a complex issue: Initially it was the Biden administration’s interest “to explore interest from private companies to produce armored electric vehicles.”

Then, Ewing recounts, “Tesla’s name was removed from the document after the existence of the list was reported late Wednesday. Plans to order Tesla vehicles had provoked controversy because of Mr. Musk’s close association with Mr. Trump.”

Well, there is that.

“Later on Wednesday,” Ewing details, “a different version of the procurement document appeared online. It referred to ‘armored electric vehicles,’ omitting any mention of Tesla. But even that project is no longer being discussed, the department said. It said it would still allow companies to submit proposals.”

Whatever the outcome, Ewing says, “The plan to buy armored electric vehicles, whether Teslas or other makes, would be a departure for the Trump administration. Among Mr. Trump’s first actions as president were executive orders calling for the removal of incentives and regulations that promoted electric vehicles.”

And Then There’s DOGE. Jack Ewing, no doubt kept busy by all this, reports in The New York Times, February 22, 2025, “The federal agency responsible for traffic safety, which has been investigating whether self-driving technology in Tesla vehicles played a role in the death of a pedestrian, will fire a ‘modest’ number of employees, an agency spokesman said late Friday. The agency did not say whether any of the fired employees were involved in investigations of Tesla, whose chief executive, Elon Musk, is leading the Department of Government Efficiency established by President Trump.”

Image by Jose Luis Magana/Associated Press via The New York Times.

Gee, do I scent retribution in this (as with January 6 investigators)? And what about AP still calling it the Gulf of You-Know-Where? 

Self-Driving Risk. Ewing describes, “The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has three active investigations of Tesla, according to agency documents, including one examining whether the company’s autonomous driving software is prone to failure when visibility is poor.”

Differing Technologies. Ewing notes, “Tesla’s self-driving technology relies on cameras to survey a car’s surroundings, in contrast with competitors like Waymo, a unit of the same company as Google, that also uses lasers and radar to recognize objects.”

I wonder which meets DOGE standards: cameras or lasers, radar and cameras? Jus’ wondering. ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025