Cops, Dealerships And Cybertrucks All Behaving Badly In This Week's News Roundup

Tesla claims its Cybertruck is built for any planet, and that it’s durable enough to go anywhere and tackle anything, but its owner’s manual says that its hitch assembly is only designed to support vertical loads up to 160 pounds. That’s less than the weight of the average American female. WhistlinDiesel’s Cybertruck Durability Test video on YouTube has over 23 million views, and caused quite a stir surrounding the real-world durability of Tesla’s most polarizing vehicle. A member of the Tesla Cybertruck Facebook group was the first to point out the hitch assembly’s shockingly low vertical weight limit in the truck’s publicly available owner’s manual. - Logan Carter Read More

Even the techiest tech bros in the world are starting to turn on Tesla and its CEO, Elon Musk. Car buyers in California’s Silicon Valley – where Tesla was started – are leaving the brand as its lineup rapidly ages, the competition gets stronger and Musk becomes even more of a right-wing piece of shit on social media. This isn’t just a vibe-based thing either. There’s hard data pointing to folks in the Bay Area saying no to Tesla and Musk. - Andy Kalmowitz Read More

Financial literacy is fundamental, folks. The first rule of being financially secure is to not roll two vehicles worth of negative equity into a ten-percent APR finance deal on a Hummer EV for 50 grand over MSRP. Don’t do that and you’re well on your way to being better with money than the guy featured in a recent Tiktok video from user @ridewithyusuf. Yusuf is a car dealer and this call with a customer is jaw dropping and eye opening. Don’t trust a bank to give you a finance deal you can afford, you have to know exactly how a loan will affect your day-to-day before signing on the dotted line. - Bradley Brownell Read More

A mom in California faced a frightening situation last week when her child was locked inside her Tesla while it was charging on a 109-degree day. With no way of opening up the vehicle to get her child out of the sweltering car, Kassandra Pineda and a bystander were forced to smash the car’s window to free the child. - Owen Bellwood Read More

You’d think after the huge scandal that was VW’s Dieselgate that the automotive industry as a whole would have learned something. A multi-billion dollar corporation getting hit with billions in fines wasn’t scary enough it seems, as diesel emission cheating keeps happening, albeit at a smaller scale. The latest bust is out of North Carolina. - Lawrence Hodge Read More

Well, this is a new one: A woman in Toledo, Ohio got a major victory when a judge awarded her a court order against a dealership that sold her a faulty car, but it all fell apart when she went to collect and found out the goddamn dealership closed. - Andy Kalmowitz Read More

“It’s not clear what order Hill didn’t comply with. Probably not lowering the window. But it’s also not clear he had time to comply,” says Devin Stone, lawyer and YouTuber known as the Legal Eagle. If you have not yet seen the body camera footage of the arrest of Miami Dolphins player Tyreek Hill, make sure you do so. What started as a regular traffic stop, allegedly for Hill driving a (visually estimated) 60 miles per hour in a 40 mph zone in his flashy McLaren, ended with his arrest and charges of careless driving and failure to wear a seatbelt. - Bradley Brownell Read More

Gilbert, Arizona has decided that your race car is ugly and it should be hidden from sight at all times. The southeast suburb of Phoenix is packed with sprawl and is adding more people to its population seemingly every day. As more people move in to more planned and gated communities, the city has decided to put on its best “Karen” impression and tell the people who live there what they can do in the privacy of their own driveways and backyards. The city’s newly clarified anti-blight rule determines that nobody can keep an inoperable vehicle on their property for longer than 15 days, even if the vehicle is hidden in your back yard. - Bradley Brownell Read More

Elon Musk has been an irredeemable weirdo for years, but recently his absurdist rhetoric and cringe memelord persona has swung violently toward the political alt-right. In a recent (now deleted) tweet he wondered aloud why Joe Biden and Kamala Harris haven’t yet been assassinated. This man, particularly as head of SpaceX, is a major contractor for the U.S. government with billions of taxpayer dollars lining his coffers, paid out by NASA, the Department of Defense. His work with the National Reconnaissance Office helped deliver U.S. spy satellites to space. His work with Twitter and Tesla, particularly related to the international heads of state these companies regularly need to deal with, are eyebrow raising. - Bradley Brownell Read More

Two people are dead after a dramatic Tesla crash on Monday morning in White Plains, just north of New York City. The electric vehicle hopped a curb, hit a tree and slammed into an apartment building. Firefighters pulled the flaming wreck away from the structure, but then the EV exploded, injuring a bystander with flying shrapnel. It’s unclear how the crash happened, but eyewitnesses described something eerily similar to an unintended acceleration event. - Ryan Erik King Read More