SEC probes Tesla over whistleblower claims on solar panel defects | Hacker News Reader

SEC probes Tesla over whistleblower claims on solar panel defects

reuters.com

Whistleblowers becoming active after they have been fired are often ascribed retaliatory motives, but there's an interesting tidbit towards the middle:

> Walmart in a 2019 lawsuit against Tesla said the latter's roof solar system led to seven store fires.

Was settled https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/walmart-settlem...

As usual with secret terms.

From my reading >Henkes, in the SEC complaint, said he told Tesla management that Tesla needs to shut down the fire-prone solar systems, report to safety regulators and notify consumers.

it appears this person did not stayed quiet and only start speaking after getting fired, he did the right thing and was fired because of that(allegedly).

>Whistleblowers becoming active after they have been fired are often ascribed retaliatory motives

They are also often fired for complaining internally about the thing they whistleblow about after being fired...

Indeed.

Just to be clear, the internal complaint preceding the firing is apparently documented, and I did not mean to imply any particular motive. On the contrary: I found the that an otherwise unconnected third party, Walmart no less, would sue over this very supportive of the claim.

I have these in my roof. I certainly would err on the sides of believing the whistleblower, especially given that my former employer’s Tesla spontaneously burst into flames while his two kids were in the back seat. Fortunately he was able to get them out on time, but I can’t even imagine.

I probably will get downvoted to hell and back again but I really have a hard time with Musk not caring about public safety at all, sacrificing humans to train his AI is still something that just completely baffles me. There is also a Very Long List of broken promises.

I have a lot of issues with Musk but you’re making this claim about somebody who’s led one company to have the highest safety ratings, ever, across multiple models of cars + factory safety levels 2x+ those of the competition, as well as another company that’s safely sent multiple sets of astronauts to & from space @ something like 1/10th the old cost & in a much more comfortable setting.

>to have the highest safety ratings,

only in Tesla PR reports(super easy to lie with statistics). Tesla is an expensive and safe car, people are having issue with the "autopilot" that is beta tested by unpaid volunteers on streets without the public pedestrians having to opt-in the beta.

Uhhh……

What?

Pretty sure the ratings were from the NHTSA

Are you saying Elon controls the NHTSA?

Tesla(with the autopilot off but drive assist on) is a safe car, I don't deny that , it is expensive ,big and with a low center of mass.

The stats most fanboys and Tesla tweet about though are not about the ratings and about the incidents per mile and those are compared with everything including teens driving old cars (where few teens drive a Tesla).

Tell Elon Musk to publish all the incidents data and we can then trust his tweets.

But my main point, if you wish to also give your opinion in, is should pedestrians say maybe vote if random people can beta test Tesla's audopilot (including the beta updates) on the roads where they and their children walk?

I think most people would consider that a paid test driver with some extra setup like attention control and camera surveillance should be allowed to run beta tests but not any random dude(especially some idiot fan that is also streaming at the same time while stress tests the newest update)

Exactly this. Autopilot was nowhere road ready when it launched. There have been multiple accidents that a normal person would've easily avoided. Plus the fact you are not playing with your own safety but that of others as well, be it drivers or pedestrians.

You can give so many warning to people to not rely on Autopilot and keep their hands on wheel. Well, people will be people.. You cannot hide your responsibility behind user instructions and warning messages IMHO.

Your argument goes like this: Somebody who is incredibly successful, a genius in many ways and very popular, can't be also a lier and psychopath.

That's a logical fallacy. In fact, the two are positively correlated (and there is a long list of entrepreneurs who are both charismatic geniuses and psychopaths).

So you need to differentiate what Elon says, and what is can be verified. In some cases the delta can be huge (and quite shocking). E.g.

> factory safety levels 2x+ those of the competition

Tesla is the single biggest OSHA violator in California.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/26727/tesla-had-3-times-as-man...

I didn’t realize there were other major auto manufacturers in California. Could you link them to me?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Motor_vehicle_assembl...

The first three of the links I clicked on haven’t been operational in over half a century.

Feel free to link some of the ones operational within… a few decades I guess.

The only one still operating except Tesla's, which is listed 3 times on that page, is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Auto_Body_California

It has ~300 employees compared to Tesla's Fremont factory with ~10000 employees.

OSHA is a federal agency.

Tesla leads the nation in OSHA violations. From the linked article: "data collected by Forbes shows that Tesla has accumulated more than three times the number of Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) violations that its top 10 competitors amassed from 2014-2018."

And indeed, the data shows that with 75% of reported safety violations, Tesla not just leads the nation in violations, it has more than 3x the safety violations of every other US auto maker combined.

factory safety levels 2x+ those of the competition

This is objectively not true. Tesla's Fremont factory leads the nation in terms of safety complaints and safety violations.

highest safety ratings, ever, across multiple models of cars

This is not true. NHTSA has awarded many cars 5 star ratings (i.e., their highest rating). Multiple car makers have multiple lines of 5-star rated vehicles.

And in fact...Tesla lost those 5-star ratings this year. https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-agency-briefed-tesla-r...

as well as another company that’s safely sent multiple sets of astronauts to & from space @ something like 1/10th the old cost & in a much more comfortable setting

Dragon costs $55 million/seat, for 3 seats vs $64m/seat for 7 seats for the Space Shuttle. Given inflation, Dragon is actually more expensive than the Space Shuttle, for less capacity. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/10/spacex-crew-3-astronaut-laun..., https://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/about/information/shutt...

And Dragon is so comfortable that the toilet didn't work and they had to break out the diapers for the first time in decades.

Dragon can carry 7, though 4 is the max for NASA flights. Also, if you think a Shuttle mission only cost $500M, you're off by a factor of 2-3.

If you disagree with NASA's estimates for how much a Shuttle mission cost, you should take that up with NASA.

I'm not the one claiming a cheaper price. According to the Planetary Society, it cost $49B to develop and launch the first Shuttle mission (in 2020 dollars).[1]

According to Pielke and Byerly [2]:

The US Congress and NASA spent more than US$192 billion (in 2010 dollars) on the shuttle from 1971 to 2010 (see 'A costly enterprise'). The agency launched 131 flights; two ended in tragedy with the loss of Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. During the operational years from 1982 to 2010, the average cost per launch was about $1.2 billion. Over the life of the programme, this increases to about $1.5 billion per launch (R. A. Pielke Space Policy 10, 78–80; 1994).

This is in 2010 dollars, but it doesn't even require adjusting for inflation to see the cost is far higher than your reporting. Each seat cost over $214M in 2010 dollars. Just for giggles, inflation since 2010 would bump that cost up to 272M per seat.

It's fair to criticize Musk for toxic work environments at Tesla, and for generally being a Twitter douche. But SpaceX has been an extraordinary success.

1. https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/sts-program-developme... 2. https://www.nature.com/articles/472038d

I think inflation works the other way, i.e. 64 million$ from decade ago would be like 80 million $ now.

Tesla started selling a literal whistle in recent days, presumably as an SEO thing to bury this news with something more banal. Pretty slimy stuff.

You can wipe up all the slime with your Apple Cloth^(tm)

please stop, this is getting depressing real quick :(

Oh my God

I thought you were joking - "there's no way this is true"

Direct link: https://shop.tesla.com/product/cyberwhistle?sku=1715672-00-A

What kind of nightmare dystopia is this timeline.

It's an abstract whistle.

I remember a similar thing as Boris Johnson was about to become prime minister [1]

> As Boris Johnson described his hobby of making model buses out of wine crates and painting happy passengers at the windows, it looked like an off-the-cuff revelation.

> Google searches for “Boris Johnson Bus” led to negative stories about Mr Johnson’s EU referendum stunt in which he travelled on a coach emblazoned with the claim that Britain sent £350 million a week to the EU. This claim led to a failed attempt to prosecute Mr Johnson.

> After the radio interview these reports were pushed out of the search results.

Of course it could just be that Boris really likes to make boxes, just like Tesla really likes to make whistles.

[1]https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/it-s-not-fare-doubters-sa...

Also discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21122806

As Presumed by who exactly? You?

Anyone thinking that you can burry « whistleblower » with « whistle » (and it’s actually called cyberwhistle) has not checked how SEO works since 1998.

I mean, you could have just tried a google search before making accusations.

You could make backlinks with the right context though.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1465838829370228737

For me, 3 of the top 10 SERPS for "tesla whistleblower" are stories about this whistle product.

Stories talking about how Elon Musk is making fun of whistleblowers by selling a whistle. Including details and/or links to the actual whistleblowers stories.

That's not exactly burying anything, more like promoting.

Burying would be if you were to search for "tesla whistleblowers" on Google and Google just giving you links to the whistle product, not allowing you to find the information you are looking for.

But that's not how Google, or any other major search engine, works, or has worked for a very long time.

So saying that's why Tesla/Elon are doing it, is quite simply false.

Sure, I can't say why they are doing it, but it has taken up 3 slots in probably the most common query.

A reputation management company would be really happy with that result. They wouldn't expect one theme to fix it all.

You underestimate the power of a false balance, and in a way, Elon Musk. When searching about "whistleblowing tesla" (or "whistle blowing tesla"!) there should be zero stories about the Tesla whistle. You turn facts that are 100% negative (Tesla has a big whistleblowing problem) into something that's 30% positive (or neutral). That's a PR win on a massive, almost unheard of scale. Just imagine the VW CEO doing a stunt like this to soften Dieselgate ...

Its not about visibility but how they manipulate and taunt people by distracting people with these silly trinkets like whistles and flame throwers. This is what psychological warfare looks like.

I have no idea how SEO works, but over half my first-page google results are about this actual whistle.

Elon's companion tweet makes it even more obvious.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1465838829370228737

I'm not sure if it really will work for that. But judging from the comments from Tesla fans, it's an easy way to print about $49. They could probably charge double that.

In fact, the second-hand market for it on Ebay has it going for 150-200 right now.

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