Tesla's vehicles have the highest fatal accident rate among all car brands in America, according to a recent iSeeCars studythat analyzed data from the U.S. Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS).

The study was conducted on model year 2018–2022 vehicles, and focused on crashes between 2017 and 2022 that resulted in occupant fatalities. 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.

The study also breaks down some of the data for individual models. The Tesla Model S has a rate more than double than average, at 5.8 per billion vehicle miles driven; meanwhile, the Tesla Model Y — the best-selling vehicle in the world has a fatal crash rate of 10.6, nearly four times the average. It ranked as the sixth worst vehicle overall. (The Hyundai Venue took the top spot overall, with a fatal crash rate of 13.9.) 

The study's authors make clear that the results do not indicate Tesla vehicles are inherently unsafe or have design flaws. In fact, Tesla vehicles are loaded with safety technology; the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) named the 2024 Model Y as a Top Safety Pick+ award winner, for example. Many of the other cars that ranked highly on the list have also been given high ratings for safety by the likes of IIHS and the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, as well.

So, why are Teslas — and many other ostensibly safe cars on the list — involved in so many fatal crashes? “The models on this list likely reflect a combination of driver behavior and driving conditions, leading to increased crashes and fatalities,” iSeeCars executive analyst Karl Brauer said in the report. “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.”

Multi-hyphenate billionaire and reproduction-obsessed father of 11 children Elon Musk wants to move his entire patchwork family into a collection of three mansions in Austin, Texas — a plan that sounds more than a bit like the beginning of a terrifying cult documentary.

Musk was born in South Africa and, aged 18, obtained Canadian citizenship through his Canada-born mother, Maye. He first studied in Canada, then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, which gave him a student visa.

In 1995 he moved to Palo Alto where he had a place at Stanford University, which would have given him another student visa. Student visas give holders the right to work part-time to support their studies.

But The Post revealed that Musk never enrolled at all–which would had invalidated his student visa. Instead he worked on his start-up. Dropping out of education to work, even if technically unpaid, is straightforwardly illegal, Leon Fresco, a former immigration attorney at the Department of Justice told the newspaper.

"If you do anything that helps to facilitate revenue creation, such as design code or try to make sales in furtherance of revenue creation, then you're in trouble," Fresco said.

Musk has said he recruited his brother to help him run the company. But Kimbal has said he actively lied to border agents, having previously been refused entry at an airport on the grounds that he was working illegally in the U.S. when he was trying to return from visiting their mother in Canada. He got a friend to drive him over the border and lied that they were going to see David Letterman's show so that he could make what in an interview with journalist Graham Bensinger as a critical meeting with investors.

"That's fraud on entry," Ira Kurzban, the former president and general counsel of the American Immigration Lawyers told The Post. "That would make him inadmissible and permanently barred from the United States," he said, unless the penalties were waived. Additionally, hiring someone without the legal right to work in the U.S. is a federal crime.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — the world's wealthiest man — has come out harshly against undocumented immigrants since becoming one of former President Donald Trump's biggest donors and campaign surrogates. But a new report reveals that he launched his career in the United States without legal status.

The Washington Post is now reporting that Musk was illegally staying in the U.S. on a student visa despite dropping out of school. While Musk, who is from South Africa, emigrated to attend Stanford University, he called his department chair shortly after the fall 1995 semester began to inform him that he wouldn't be attending classes.

At that point, Musk was legally obligated to leave the United States, according to the Post. But instead, he illegally overstayed his visa while building his first company, Zip2 (originally called the Global Link Information Network).

Prolific YouTuber Hank Green starts the viral video below by explaining — like the proud science nerd he is — what prompted his experiment. Unusual among popular internet content makers, Green’s trigger was introspection.

Green — as he admits — had fallen prey to a number of false beliefs, brought to his attention courtesy of the internet, and he wondered about his propensity for gullibility in these instances and how he had come to lose sight of the truth.

“I went through a bunch of lies that I believed…” Green says, “whether it was about a quote that somebody said or a graph that I believed was representative of reality — and I realized later that that quote was taken out of context or that graph was mislabeled.”

Having designed the experiment — an examination to oust internet-derived falsehoods from his beliefs — Green then decided to try his experiment on someone else: Elon Musk, the self-proclaimed free speech advocate who owns X and routinely shares misinformation on the platform.

Part of the deal with being CEO is that you get a big paycheck in exchange for being the public face of a company. For most people, at most companies, that means, at minimum, trying not to make an ass of yourself in public.

Tweeting a Holocaust joke, for example, might very well get you booted. Punching down at marginalized communities? Also a bad look.

But the same rules don't apply if you're the richest person on the planet, running companies stacked with cronies.

Elon Musk’s love of sci-fi has turned against him. Or at least it has turned into a copyright issue. 

Both Musk and his company Tesla are named in a new lawsuit by Alcon Entertainment, a production company for Blade Runner 2049, which alleges the film’s imagery was used in promotional material for this month’s robo-taxi event. Alcon claims it explicitly denied a request for permission from the company shortly before the Cybercab was unveiled, but Musk and Tesla allegedly used the imagery anyway. 

X has failed to avoid a $400,000 fine from Australian regulators due to its alleged failures to help clean up child sex material on the platform.

The eSafety Commissioner, the country’s internet safety regulator, ordered X—which was then called Twitter— to hand over information about the steps it was taking to fight child abuse on the platform in 2022. It was then handed a fine in 2023 for failing to do so.

But the social network argued it was no longer under any obligation to pay, as Twitter “no longer existed” as it was merged with Musk’s X Corp back in April 2023.

Australian Judge Michael Wheelahan labeled parts of X’s defense as "superficial" and requiring "leaps of logic," and is now undertaking civil proceedings against the company.

Snippets from an eyebrow-raising conversation recorded during a Tesla meeting in Germany are making the rounds this week. Allegedly, the Grünheide-based Tesla Gigafactory’s managing director and human resources director chose a random group of 30 employees on sick leave. Then, they went to their houses to “see how they were doing.”

A German newspaper, the Handelsblatt, apparently recorded the conversation during a Giga Berlin-Brandenburg operations meeting. While HR Director Erik Demmler clarified that the visits had “nothing to do with general suspicion,” Managing Director André Thierig has a history of making internally-facing remarks about the operation’s intolerance for factory workers who “couldn’t get out of bed.”

Germany allows these “corporate” visits. In any case, the employees didn’t vibe well with them.

“You could just tell by the aggression,” the paper quoted Demmler saying. He recounted employees slamming their doors shut and making threats to involve the police. Others questioned whether the execs needed to schedule the visits ahead of time.

Many Americans might feel shocked to learn that the U.S. also allows home visits by employers. Bosses can “visit” or perform a “welfare check” by knocking on your door. They must respect your privacy and personal space. Culturally, of course, I’d expect such a move would be received similarly to, if not worse than, the German Gigafactory workforce response.

I Feel Bad

Finally saw a Tesla pickup today, but it was parked at a business, so I couldn’t mock the cyberfuck who bought it.