The good, old fashioned oil-backed naked-short selling conspiracy "FUD" just keeps on rolling in.
The employee exodus at Tesla shows no signs of stopping, and the latest to fall victims to the constant turnover of Tesla staff are two members of the company's security team and its Director of Manufacturing Operations for the Model 3. About a week ago, it was reported that Tesla's information security chief, Karl Wagner, had left the company. Wagner had an extensive background in intelligence and was a longtime former CIA operative. Wagner wrote what we can only describe as a carefully worded post on LinkedIn, announcing his departure:
Elon Musk [sic] is a visionary and Tesla employees second only to the shadow warriors of the CIA in ingenuity, courage and perseverance. As I move to the next phase of my professional life, I’m proud and honored to have worked alongside them.
Wagner's departure marked the second security chief change at Tesla in less than a year.
A Tesla vehicle near Pittsburgh caught fire and burned for hours on Wednesday night at an area service garage. The fire occurred despite Tesla engineers reportedly having access to the vehicle prior to moving it. The photos are stunning, showing what appears to be a vehicle that has been close to completely incinerated and reduced to a heap of smoldering wreckage.
The same car had previously caught fire back in February in a garage around the same area, according to CBS 2 Pittsburgh. It was being towed to a new shop on Wednesday and "somehow" caught fire again, despite the fact that a Tesla engineer tried to reduce the risk of fire by removing the fuse from the battery pack prior to transporting the vehicle.
“We removed the car from the garage. A Tesla engineer removed the fuse from the battery pack prior to transport, indicating that would make the car safe for transport. We brought it here to Monroeville, arrived around 3:30 in the afternoon, and about 6:20, the car spontaneously caught fire,” forensic engineer David Bizzak said.
Just hours ahead of Tesla's planned autonomous driving cash grab event, another report of a fatal accident involving a Tesla has surfaced - and it may be one of the most disturbing yet. A 77-year-old woman was killed after a "violent crash" ripped through the door of the Tesla that she was riding in, ultimately throwing her into a lane of traffic on the 405 Freeway in Long Beach, according to the Long Beach Post.
The crash took place at about 9:40 PM PST on Monday, April 15. The accident happened on the southbound 405 at Lakewood Boulevard.
Although the accident isn't attributed to Autopilot in the report, there remains some mystery as to how it occurred to begin with. The story says that "For some reason, the Tesla’s driver swerved and hit a curb at the end of the Lakewood Boulevard on-ramp, according to the CHP," without giving further information as to what caused the accident. The driver then lost control of the vehicle and hit an empty Chevy that was stopped on the shoulder.
MyNewsLA did note, however, that the accident occurred near an on-ramp and that the Tesla made "an unsafe turning movement":
The preliminary investigation revealed the Tesla driver made an unsafe turning movement causing the vehicle to collide with a raised concrete curb at the end of the Lakewood Boulevard on-ramp.
After hitting the stopped vehicle, the Tesla's right rear passenger door was torn through, ejecting the woman into the fifth lane of the freeway, where a BMW hit her, killing her, according to the California Highway Patrol. The crash is still being investigated and nobody was arrested at the scene.
