In a tweet posted around midnight, Alameda County officials said that they've been in talks with Elon Musk's Tesla, and authorities have agreed the electric carmaker can take steps “in preparation for possible reopening as soon as next week.” Read the rest

Tesla worker: 'We’re extremely frustrated, angry, scared, that Elon is putting his cars before his workers.'

Tesla's chief executive said he reopened production at the company’s Fremont, California factory Monday, which Musk said he knew was a violation of public health orders. Read the rest

Elon Musk just said he was planning to break the law. Read the rest

Elon Musk told employees at Tesla's California factory that they are back to normal in a company email. Governor Gavin Newsom says he's looking into the electric car company's reopening as a potential violation of a public health order. Read the rest

Elon Musk's electric car company plans to reopen its one and only factory in the United States as soon as Friday, for 'limited operations,' in a county where coronavirus lockdown is ongoing. Read the rest

A fatal Tesla Model X crash involving a "dozing driver" is blamed on the car's autopilot feature in a new lawsuit against the electric vehicle company led by Elon Musk. Read the rest

IMAGE: A weird Elon Musk tweet earlier today.

Cleanup on aisle Elon Musk!

The Tesla CEO seems to be very anxious about something. I wonder what it is? He went way off-script during a Tesla earnings call today. Way, way, way off script. Meltdown time. Sounds like they cut his audio off to shut him up. Read the rest

Tesla has agreed to cut down on the number of active workers inside Elon Musk's electric vehicle factory in Fremont, CA, but authorities say they have yet to comply with other coronavirus lockdown measures, like not making more cars right now.

“Tesla needs to comply with the health order,” said a county spokesman Wednesday. Read the rest

Tesla calls it Autopilot, but it didn't help Walter Huang's Model X avoid the crash that killed him. Huang was playing a video game on his phone, according to a report issued by the National Transportation Safety Board, which is why he didn't notice it speeding up and veering into a concrete barrier. But it also wrote that more crashes are "foreseeable" if Tesla doesn't make changes to its driver-assist technology's design.

While approaching a paved gore area dividing the main travel lanes of US-101 from the SR-85 left-exit ramp, the SUV moved to the left and entered the gore. The vehicle continued traveling through the gore and struck a damaged and nonoperational crash attenuator at a speed of about 71 mph. The crash attenuator was positioned at the end of a concrete median barrier. As a result of the collision, the SUV rotated counterclockwise and the front body structure separated from the rear of the vehicle. The Tesla was involved in subsequent collisions with two other vehicles, a 2010 Mazda 3 and a 2017 Audi A4.

The Tesla’s high-voltage battery was breached in the collision and a postcrash fire ensued. On-scene witnesses found the Tesla driver in his seat with his lap/shoulder belt buckled. They removed him from the vehicle before it was engulfed in flames. The driver was transported to a local hospital, where he died from blunt-force trauma injuries. The driver of the Mazda sustained minor injuries, and the driver of the Audi was uninjured.

System performance data downloaded from the Tesla indicated that the driver was operating the SUV using the Traffic-Aware Cruise Control (an adaptive cruise control system) and Autosteer system (a lane-keeping assist system), which are advanced driver assistance systems in Tesla’s “Autopilot” suite.

Researchers at McAfee adding a small piece of tape to the "3" on a 35 MPH traffic sign, to make it look a little like an "8." Then they put two older model Teslas in autonomous mode, and both accelerated to the new speed limit.

Don't try this in a school zone, kids.

From Business Insider:

Tesla's newer models use proprietary cameras, and MobilEye EyeQ3 has released newer versions of its cameras that McAfee tested and said were not fooled by the modified sign.

The McAfee researcher Povolny told MIT Tech Review that the findings were still concerning, though, as plenty of 2016 Teslas are still on the roads. "We are not trying to spread fear and say that if you drive this car, it will accelerate into through a barrier, or to sensationalize it," he said. "The reason we are doing this research is we're really trying to raise awareness for both consumers and vendors of the types of flaws that are possible."

Image: McAfee Read the rest

Last week I posted the sad tale of Alec, a man who bought a used Tesla at auction and was saddened when Tesla later remotely disabled the car's autodrive feature.

Tesla justified the action by telling Alec that autodrive was "not a feature that you had paid for."

The story of Tesla's mean-spiritedness spread quickly, and as you might guess, Tesla jumped into damage control mode. It restored autodrive to the car and told Alec, "if it wasn't for that meddlesome miscommunication, you would never have lost autopilot in the first place!" Let's hope Tesla had a stern word with miscommunication for causing such trouble.

From The Verge:

Tesla has removed features from used cars in the past, but typically does so before the car is sold off to a third-party dealer or a new owner. Since Tesla pulled these features both after it sold the car to the dealer, and after that dealer sold it to Alec, it caused some fear that the company was setting a precedent for yanking features on a whim.

That now seems less likely to be true, although owners and potential customers should always be prepared to deal with changes. Tesla is pushing the boundaries when it comes to adding new features and generally making cars upgradeable via over-the-air software updates, and other automakers are (slowly) following suit. But the easier it gets for automakers to remotely update or change the features of a car, the easier it gets to take those features away, too.

A Tesla driver in California died in a March 2018 crash while using the Autopilot driver-assistance system.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) disclosed in documents made public Tuesday that Walter Huang, the 38-year-old Apple software engineer killed by his Tesla, previously reported that on prior trips his car steered away from the highway by itself. Read the rest

Don't miss the license plate. (Elon McFly) Read the rest

A fellow identified as Alec in this Verge story bought a Tesla at an auction, which was advertised as having “Enhanced Autopilot” and “Full Self Driving Mode.” Soon after Alec started driving the car, these features were deactivated without warning. Alec contacted Tesla and received the following explanation:

Tesla has recent identified instances of customers being incorrectly configured for Autopilot versions that they did not pay for. Since, there was an audit done to correct these instances. Your vehicle is one of the vehicles that was incorrectly configured for Autopilot. We looked back at your purchase history and unfortunately Full-Self Driving was not a feature that you had paid for. We apologize for the confusion. If you are still interested in having those additional features we can begin the process to purchase the upgrade.

If Alec wants to get these software features reactivated he'll have to pay Telsa $8,000 to get them to press a keyboard button.

From The Verge:

With a normal car’s built-in features, even ones that may depend on software, it’s reasonable to think a technician or mechanic would need to physically access the car to remove it. Even with a technology product like a laptop or smartphone, updates generally can’t be forcibly rolled back without the consent of the owner — unless the device has special IT software installed. In those cases, the company generally owns the device or has the owner sign a legal agreement anyhow.

Tesla’s over-the-air updates have caused anxiety before. This kind of control by a carmaker wasn’t possible until recently, and Alec’s situation raises questions about what used car owners can expect in the future.