As If You Needed Another Reason to Avoid Tesla

When Tom LoSavio bought hisTesla Model S in 2017, he thought he was buying a car that would one day drive itself.  LoSavio paid more than $100,000 for the luxury sedan, including $8,000 for lifetime access to its most advanced driver-assistance features. Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk said that the hardware in the company’s cars would eventually allow all of its cars to drive themselves.  “My wife and I talked about what a great thing it would be if we could just get in a car and have it drive us places,” LoSavio told The Wall Street Journal.

In the nine years since, LoSavio said it has become clear that Tesla took him for a ride. He is the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit that alleges that Tesla charged customers thousands of dollars in pricey upgrades for a product that didn’t, and still doesn’t, exist.  LoSavio alleges that Musk and Tesla have made repeated claims that were false about the self-driving capabilities of these vehicles and misled consumers who paid extra because they believed the company’s marketing. His lawsuit is one of several ongoing efforts by Tesla owners looking to hold the company accountable for overpromising and under-delivering on its Full Self-Driving (FSD) product.

Tesla is facing mounting legal issues in Netherland and Australia, over charges that the company misled customers about the cars’ capabilities. The matter calls into question Musk’s decade-long marketing pitch that Tesla’s autonomous vehicles were just around the corner. That promise kept Tesla’s stock near all-time highs—and with a market cap that exceeds most other automakers combined—even as its share of the electric-vehicle market has eroded.

The lawsuits and European campaign represent just thousands of Tesla customers. Wall Street analysts, however, estimate that there are millions of Teslas on the road with the outdated hardware no longer capable of running the most sophisticated version of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) software.  LoSavio won class-action status for his lawsuit in September. The class represents approximately 3,000 people in California, a figure that excludes the many Tesla owners who have signed arbitration agreements with the company that prevent them from suing. 

Tesla started including early versions of its self-driving tech in its vehicles in 2014. By 2015, Musk was publicly claiming that Tesla vehicles could drive themselves entirely within two years. Then in 2016, Tesla announced that all new cars built from then on had the hardware required for full self-driving. Musk told the press that a Tesla would drive itself from Los Angeles to New York City by the end of 2017.

But it was all bullshit.  Eventually Tesla’s plans required a more sophisticated computer and cameras than were installed in LoSavio’s car. In 2020 and 2021, it started offering customers upgrades to the third edition of its computer and camera set. Some customers like LoSavio, who paid upfront for lifetime access, got complimentary upgrades from Tesla. Others who wanted to use the FSD/self-driving technology but paid monthly could pay $1,000 for the upgrade.

Then in 2023, Tesla upgraded its hardware for the fourth time and started selling new cars with its latest chip. That meant that customers like LoSavio, who got updated to the third-edition computer a few years prior, once again had outdated equipment. The company hasn’t made any moves since January 2025, when Musk told investors that the company would have to do yet another computer upgrade for customers who bought the lifetime FSD (Full Self-Driving) package.

 

Earth Day Revisited

Keystone Kash Paranoid About Being Fired

On Friday, April 10, as FBI Director Kash Patel was preparing to leave work for the weekend, he struggled to log into an internal computer system. He quickly became convinced that he had been locked out, and he panicked, frantically calling aides and allies to announce that he had been fired by the White House, according to nine people familiar with his outreach. Two of these people described his behavior as a “freak-out.”  News of his emotional outburst ricocheted through the bureau, prompting chatter among officials and, in some corners of the building, expressions of relief. The White House fielded calls from the bureau and from members of Congress asking who was now in charge of the FBI.  It turned out that the answer was Patel-- he had not been fired. The access problem, two people familiar with the matter said, appears to have been a technical error, and it was quickly resolved. “It was all ultimately bullshit,” according to one FBI official who spoke with the Atlantic.

But Patel, according to multiple current officials, is deeply concerned that his job is in jeopardy. And he has good reasons to think so—

Meanwhile, Back at the Office . . .

Dozens of Sloths Die at Shady Roadside Zoo Operation

On a busy tourist strip in Orlando, behind noisy bars and souvenir shops, 21 sloths in crates arrived at a warehouse at the end of a grueling international trip.  Soon, they would all be dead.

The new home of the tree-dwelling mammals was the off-site facility of a new roadside attraction called “Sloth World,” a $49 animal encounter marketed as a conservation-focused center scheduled to open soon.   Nothing could have prepared the sloths for this. Until recently, they lived wild in the forest canopies of Guyana.  The animals' new home wasn't ready to receive them.  There was no running water. No electricity. The space heaters meant to keep them warm were plugged in with extension cords running from another building, according to a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission incident report that Inside Climate News obtained through an open-records request. But the heaters repeatedly tripped the fuse and shut off. At least one night in December 2024, the agency said, the sloths were left alone in the cold warehouse without heat.   One by one, they died. 

List of Missing/Dead Scientists Linked to American Secrets Grows

The ominous web of U.S. scientists and lab employees who have died or gone missing continues to grow as two more cases have been linked to the disturbing trend. 

NASA scientist Frank Maiwald died on July 4, 2024 in Los Angeles at the age of 61, but the cause of death has never been made public and officials confirmed that an autopsy was never performed.  Maiwald had been a prominent researcher at the space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) since 1999 and worked on multiple projects tied to advanced satellite technology that could scan Earth and other planets.

In June 2023, just 13 months before his death, Maiwald was the lead researcher on a breakthrough that could help future space missions detect clear signs of life on other worlds, including Jupiter's moon Europa, Saturn’s moon Enceladus, or the dwarf planet Ceres.  Despite Maiwald being a JPL Principal, an award given to scientists 'making outstanding individual contributions' in their fields, NASA has never commented publicly on the scientist's death, and the only public record marking his passing was an obituary posted online.  The online obituary set up for Maiwald did not mention any health issues before the 61-year-old's death, and NASA JPL would neither confirm nor deny that Maiwald had been employed there for decades despite records of his achievements listed on their website. 

Lady Gaga & Doechii - Runway