Elon Musk is undeniably brilliant, among the greatest entrepreneurs and technologists of all time. While his successes profitably building electric vehicles and launching rockets are well known, few appreciate SpaceX’s burgeoning and possibly unbeatable satellite and internet business. Bloomberg reported that SpaceX is valued at more than $200 billion, the world’s second most valuable startup after China’s ByteDance, parent of the TikTok social media platform.
Count me among those who are in awe of Musk’s achievements, but I’m neither a Musk fanboy nor do I trust him. I’m always mindful of this story the Wall Street Journal published three years ago reporting that China’s leader Xi Jinping regards Musk as a “technology utopian with no political allegiance to any country.” I’m certain Xi didn’t reach that conclusion reading America’s corporate media but rather made his determination based on a detailed analysis provided by his intelligence folks, who have achieved considerable success spying on U.S. government, military facilities, and academic institutions.
Tesla enjoys great privileges in China that no other foreign-owned company has ever been granted. Musk was given those privileges in exchange for helping the communist country accelerate its domination of the global electric vehicle industry. Tesla’s success in China was responsible for birthing a domestic ecosystem of EV suppliers, one that Musk has remained loyal to. Bloomberg reported that when Musk announced plans to build a giant factory in Mexico, he invited Chinese suppliers to Mexico to replicate the local supply chain at Tesla’s Shanghai plant.
Musk initially supported the Biden/Harris administration’s tariffs on China-made electric vehicles, but later reversed his position. My guess is a Mandarin-chirping birdie reminded Musk of his communist China overseers.
Notably, China doesn’t tolerate any of Musk’s guff, which is why he’s a choir boy when operating in that country and is always quick to sing the praises of its citizens. China was unwilling to tolerate Tesla’s manufacturing defects in its earlier years, nor the company’s treatment of its customers. After a protester alleged that faulty brakes on her family’s Model 3 sedan had caused a crash that left her parents needing hospital treatment, Tesla issued a statement saying that the woman’s father had been speeding at the time of the crash, citing a police report.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, a high-level Communist Party body that oversees the country’s legal apparatus, accused Tesla of arrogance and of endangering Chinese consumers by selling defective products.
“Tesla has to face up to the torment of its Chinese customers” and stop “pretending to be oblivious to hidden dangers of which it’s well aware,” the commission said publicly.
Hours after the commission issued its statement, Tesla immediately began singing another tune.
“We apologize for failing to resolve the problem of the car owner in time,” Tesla posted on China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform. “We will try our best to learn the lessons of this experience.”
Bloomberg reported that Tesla once lobbied China’s government to use its censorship powers to silence critics on Chinese social media who questioned the safety of the company’s cars. So much for Musk’s claims for being a “free speech absolutist.”
America has an automotive regulatory agency called the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration, comprised of bureaucrats I perceive as doing God’s work and as dedicated as their counterparts in China. Unfortunately, the NHTSA is badly underfunded, and the major automakers have the financial resources and resolve to block the NHTSA’s efforts to protect Americans from shoddily made and often dangerous automobiles.
When GM and Ford issue their mounting safety recalls it’s not because their respective and obscenely paid CEOS, Mary Barra and Jim Farley, are plagued with concerns about the harm their increasingly problem-plagued vehicles might inflict. Rather, it’s because the NHTSA forced them to.
In some instances, NHTSA recalls are too costly, and the automakers will go to the mat derailing the agency’s safety efforts. As I outlined in this post last December, the NHTSA for nearly seven years has been trying to force a dozen automakers to recall 52 million ARC airbag inflators because the agency says the parts are potentially unsafe and susceptible to ruptures that can maim and kill vehicle occupants. The recall would be the second biggest in automotive history, trailing only the 67 million Takata airbags the NHTSA ordered recalled beginning in 2013 that cost automakers nearly $25 billion and forced Japan-based Takata into bankruptcy.
The Wall Street Journal previously reported that GM has the biggest financial exposure to an ARC recall, having installed 20 million vehicles with the potentially dangerous airbags. It’s known that a Michigan woman driving a GM-made Chevy Traverse SUV was killed by an exploding ARC airbag and that three other injuries resulting from the airbag rupturing involved passengers traveling in a Traverse.
Elon Musk has shown nothing but disdain for the NHTSA, as he has for the SEC, and anyone else who doesn’t worship him, including President Biden, who Musk ridiculed as a damp sock puppet. Musk for years exaggerated the capabilities of Tesla’s self-driving technology called Autopilot, and Reuters previously reported the company was under criminal investigation for Musk’s repeated claims that Tesla vehicles could safely drive themselves.
The U.S. Department of Justice reportedly launched its probe in 2021 following more than a dozen crashes, some of them fatal, involving Autopilot, which was activated during the accidents, according to Reuters.
The German newspaper Handelsblatt earlier this year reported on Tesla’s strategy for minimizing damning reports and records of Tesla’s Autopilot technology based on a treasure trove of internal documents a whistleblower leaked to the publication. The documents included 3,000 entries about customers’ safety concerns and descriptions of more than 1,000 crashes, involving Tesla vehicles manufactured from 2015 to March 2022. The files contained more than 2,400 gripes about sudden acceleration and more than 1,500 complaints about braking problems, including unintentional emergency braking and so-called “phantom stops,” when the car suddenly brakes for no apparent reason.
Tesla’s policy was to avoid responding to customer complaints in writing, likely because it wanted to avoid a damning paper trail that could be used in litigation.
When Donald Trump takes office in January, Elon Musk will be empowered to critically weaken the NHTSA, and possibly eliminate the agency. Trump has named Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to co-lead a newly created Department of Government Efficiency, an entity Trump said will operate outside the confines of government.
Trump said that Musk and Ramaswamy “will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”
Trump and Musk are kindred spirits when it comes to disdain for regulatory oversight. Rest assured, Musk will set his sights on the NHTSA.
Americans must understand why and how the NHTSA was founded. The agency was formed in wake of Ralph Nader’s seminal 1965 book “Unsafe at any Speed” documenting how U.S. automakers were knowingly selling faulty vehicles, including some that were death traps like the Chevy Corvair. The public was outraged, which led to the creation of the National Highway Safety Bureau, renamed the NHTSA in 1970 under the newly established Department of Transportation.
As best I can determine, Republican and Democrat administrations allowed the NHTSA to function without political interference, as the merits of automotive safety has never been a debatable political issue. I’ve previously outlined the myriad automotive safety lapses that have occurred since the NHTSA’s creation, but I’ve yet to come across evidence they were caused by White House interference. I expect that will change when Musk is empowered to reduce or eliminate regulatory oversight.
Nader in August urged regulators to recall Tesla’s self-driving technology, calling it “the most dangerous and irresponsible actions by a car company in decades.”
American consumers should be demanding the critical auto safety regulatory protections that China’s citizens enjoy, particularly since Trump’s tariffs policies will prevent U.S. car buyers from buying China’s more technologically advanced and considerably cheaper electric vehicles. The NHTSA’s budget should be significantly increased to better oversee the increasing software complexity of vehicles, which is causing a surge in safety recalls.
GM recently told Wall Street analysts that its warranty repair costs will continue to rise; the company this week issued a recall on 461,839 vehicles because of a transmission control valve issue that could cause the rear wheels to lock up, increasing the risk of a crash. The recall involves some models of 2020-2022 Chevrolet Silverado, GMC Sierra, 2021 Cadillac Escalade, Chevrolet Tahoe and GMC Yukon, among others.
Empowering Musk with control of the NHTSA is as foolish and dangerous as would be naming a Mafia boss to oversee the Justice Department. Sadly, America’s corporate media prefers to imagine Trump as a modern-day Hitler rather than focus on where his policies and plans are undeniable dangers to Americans.