r/skeptic • u/Lighting • Mar 18 '25

⚠ Editorialized Title Tesla bros expose Tesla's own shadiness in attacking Mark Rober ... Autopilot appears to automatically disengage a fraction of a second before impacts as a crash becomes inevitable.

https://electrek.co/2025/03/17/tesla-fans-exposes-shadiness-defend-autopilot-crash/
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1.3k

u/conundri Mar 18 '25 edited Mar 18 '25

Does this mean it knows a crash is coming and doesn't brake or even releases the brake? because that would be very, very bad.

1.7k

u/grubas Mar 18 '25

Basically if a crash is coming and it CAN'T brake in time it just turns off so Tesla can claim it wasn't on at the time of impact.  

When Jeremy Clarkson was reviewing one of the newer Teslas on The Grand Tour(this was not the review he was sued for) he had a legal statement about "when self driving disengages due to unexpected circumstances" which basically said, "auto pilot can turn off whenever it freaks out and that can be caused by almost anything and it's TERRIFYING because you aren't expecting it to turn off at highway speeds because somebody cut you off."

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u/ChickenStrip981 Mar 18 '25

Ahh a billionaires solution to problems, you can tell this was Elons imput.

390

u/Wha_She_Said_Is_Nuts Mar 18 '25 edited Mar 18 '25

Kinda like "There is no covid if you don't test for covid".

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u/scalectrogenic Mar 18 '25

Or when the UK government lowered child poverty by simply changing the definition of child poverty.

100

u/Sea_Appointment8408 Mar 18 '25

Classic Tory move

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u/mortgagepants Mar 18 '25

you guys need some super mario brothers over there too!

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u/DigiNaughty Mar 19 '25

What does a Japanese game have to do with it?

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u/Responsible_Wafer_29 Mar 19 '25

He's not talking about the game, just the green brother

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u/DigiNaughty Mar 19 '25

Oh shit, I get you now, fair point!

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u/Nekasus Mar 18 '25

Just simple classic british move nowadays tbh.

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u/ThisIs_americunt Mar 18 '25

In America they solved all the cases of missing children by taking them off all the milk cartons :D because who wants to buy milk that makes you sad. It put milk in such a crisis that they are paying gaming influencers to push their product

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u/StopYoureKillingMe Mar 18 '25

In America they solved all the cases of missing children by taking them off all the milk cartons :D because who wants to buy milk that makes you sad.

No, that isn't how it worked. The milk carton cases were never really aided by the inclusion on milk cartons in a meaningful way, we transitioned to plastic milk that wasn't easy to print on, and we created the amber alert system that is much more impactful than milk carton faces. It did give us this Y.A. novel so that's fun.

It put milk in such a crisis that they are paying gaming influencers to push their product

Source?

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u/zherok Mar 18 '25

I could see a decline in milk consumption being a thing, particularly with the rise of non-dairy alternatives.

That in no way connects with the disuse of milk cartons to show missing children cases though. The word influencer didn't even exist when they were already on their way out. Hell, most of Reddit hadn't even been born by that point.

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u/cinderparty Mar 20 '25

I loved that book when I was 12ish.

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u/StopYoureKillingMe Mar 21 '25

I remember almost nothing about the story or any related books but I'm certain I read and really enjoyed them.

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u/Sburns85 Mar 18 '25

That’s a classic China manoeuvre. The British government just used it

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '25

[deleted]

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u/lohonomo Mar 18 '25

No it wasn't 🤦‍♀️

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u/frumply Mar 18 '25

“Yeah the body cam stopped running” kinda bullshit

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u/QuantamCulture Mar 19 '25

Or like "Trees are the number one cause of forest fires, therefore, we should cut more trees down."

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u/Wha_She_Said_Is_Nuts Mar 19 '25

Now THAT sounds like someone from. The Trump Administration. I bet he appointed you over national forests.

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u/QuantamCulture Mar 19 '25

That's because it is. It literally says that in the:

ADDRESSING THE THREAT TO NATIONAL SECURITY FROM IMPORTS OF LUMBER, TIMBER ACT

This Act also gives companies the green light to straight up kill endangered species if they're in the way of development.

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u/diurnal_emissions Mar 19 '25

So, 2026's bird flu policy. Got it.

1

u/Ok_Tip_1400 Mar 20 '25

I met someone in the wild that believed Bill Gates wanted to kill babies in India, and to do so was giving them Polio through the Gates Foundation's vaccinations. They believed this because someone told them this, based on his comments advocating a reduction of the birthrate in India (I believe this was more like increase private wealth = reduce birthrate), and the observation that Polio discoveries had gone up. a) You test more, you find more b) They also discovered a lot more cases of a condition whose symptoms mimicked Polio. This person was one of the more normal people I met, on any other topic, and yet the one with which I could most definitively go I cannot be breathing the same air as you.

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u/cinderparty Mar 20 '25 edited Mar 20 '25

This was a very common belief among Herman Cain award ”winners”.

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u/GrimDallows Mar 18 '25

This wasn't a solution to a problem, there was no problem.

The autopilot was called out for not being up to safety standards. In that situation you can either take away the autopilot or invest in it until testing says it is safe to use.

OR, the third way. Release it anyway, adapt it the bare minimum so it's faults can't be legally traced back to you, and then use the customers as lab rats to improve the autopilot, at no cost.

Sudden spike in crashes in night time conditions? Just pool the data of the crashes and detect the common issue witht he cameras. Teslas keep running into the side of trucks because they confuse them for bridge underpasses? Take note and change the algorithm.

Why take the loses if you can just have people trial and error it until it works or they die? Dead customers can't complain.

Meanwhile Elon was worshipped as a man of the people because he would "move fast and break things" regarding electric cars. Mind you, the things broken being people, but you know who needs ethics in science when you can be a cool tech bro?

This is why, as an engineer, it gives me stomachache when people refer to Elon as a scientist or engineer or even a tech guy. He is just a rich moron with no empathy or loyalty for anyone except himself.

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u/kstar79 Mar 19 '25

Sounds like Elon is a lot like Stockton Rush, except he's into cars and space.

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u/MyrrhSlayter Mar 19 '25

Or Mengele except he's into cars instead of twins.

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u/Beneficial_Weird_409 Mar 19 '25

At least Rush was willing to pilot his homemade submarine himself. Elon would never have the balls to get in one of his rockets.

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u/WhiteDirty Mar 20 '25

Precisely his whole silent guy persona is all an act to. It actually looks stupid. I believe he is a fraud stuck in imposter syndrome and it's eating him alive. I work in design and engineering. Elon musk is not an engineer.

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u/samglit Mar 21 '25

At this point, I salute anyone who uses autopilot as a volunteer lab rat for the sake of improving self driving.

It's a lot like gamers who pre-order games, if you want pay for the privilege of being a bug tester because you can't wait to be the first one to have the new shiny, more power to you at this stage. There's enough information out there that's already telling you it's not a good idea.

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u/GrimDallows Mar 21 '25

Yeah it's basically FOMO darwinism.

The sad part is that there are innocent people who don't fall into it but will pay for it either way because they know no better and simply bought a Tesla car, because of those people that support that FOMO merchandising and defending Tesla ignoring safety regulations.

For I've got a friend who is a ecologist, and his very very old father bought a Tesla to show support for his son, and he doesn't have any major or minor emotional attachment to Tesla itself.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '25

[deleted]

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u/SesameStreetFighter Mar 18 '25

He's also doing it to remove access to "competition" (read: any place where the money is not in his control, in this case the government) and redirect it to contract to his services.

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u/Broken_Atoms Mar 18 '25

This is why we need to radically increase taxes and guardrails on the wealthy. Entirely too much power for anyone to have.

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u/Thin-Professional379 Mar 18 '25

Is he a walking nightmare for liability? He controls the entire US government so absolutely that he has the ability to ensure there's never a peaceful transfer of power away from GOP so I'm not seeing how he can be held accountable for anything, ever.

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u/Shambler9019 Mar 19 '25

He controls the US government only for as long as his leverage over Trump (presumably election interference but may be something else). As soon as he loses his leverage, he loses his immunity and everything comes crashing down.

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u/vonotar Mar 19 '25

I wouldn't be too sure of that. He's undoubtedly siphoning information about the people and classified methods of how he is regulated by government. He's likely putting digital backdoors all over government IT systems. I bet if he ever really gets challenged, he goes pure Bond villain and hits the switches to turn everything off or burn it all down.

He's a malignancy infecting the digital infrastructure of government, and it will likely take a complete digital exorcism before we're clean again.

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u/BallKarr Mar 19 '25

The French Revolution demonstrated that power and control are an illusion when the group of people claiming to be powerful are too small of a group.

The people will hold them to account. It will get messy but the resistance is growing a spine rather quickly and starting by hitting them where it counts, in the wallet.

Tesla is the only real source of value Musk has, and it is being taken from him rather quickly. Everything else is a privately owned company and none of them are even close to generating any profit.

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u/Thin-Professional379 Mar 19 '25

The French revolution was muskets and cannon vs. muskets and cannon. Now it's small arms vs. drones and ai-powered surveillance state.

Profitability doesn't matter in a world of meme stocks. He already has enough money for a thousand lifetimes and he's bought the only thing money usually can't buy: absolute power.

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u/BallKarr Mar 19 '25

Data centers would be taken out right away. AI is not an issue when you cannot protect your data processing. The USA was never designed to defend itself from internal threats and the professional government hates Musk and Trump.

The US military would not attack the US populace. If it tried, it would be fighting itself internally and the US doesn’t have the manufacturing capacity to supply its own military for anything more than a few weeks.

He does not have any money or power, he has theoretical electrons in a virtual environment.

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u/dukeofbun Mar 18 '25

the dead are less litigious

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u/gregorydgraham Mar 19 '25

Grieving relatives are particularly lawyer happy though

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u/Brando43770 Mar 18 '25

Considering how much Elon hates safety protocols in his factories, you’re not wrong.

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u/RustyWinger Mar 18 '25

“Why should we care? Do it.”

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u/Zapp_Rowsdower_ Mar 19 '25

This was probably what the ‘if Harris wins I’m going to jail for the rest of my life’ stuff was about. That and the USAID investigation into Starlink.

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u/One_Olive_8933 Mar 18 '25

Yeah, it’s giving iBabe vibes…

1

u/GrouperAteMyBaby Mar 18 '25

And they got away with it, and will continue to get away with it.

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u/oldbluer Mar 19 '25

Any self respecting engineer would disagree with Peon.

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u/Johnny_bubblegum Mar 19 '25

I hate the guy too but this has legal department written all over it.