The picture that's more and more clear is that, you know, the autopilot full self-driving piece of this has been fundamentally kind of a criminal enterprise from day one.

We don't even have a regulatory system around this stuff.

We have a framework, which is this SAE level system, and they've been breaking it by telling people the car self-driving, but telling regulators, oh, no, it's level-2 driver assistance.

Yeah. 2 driver assistance. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

I'm your host, Paris Marks.

And this week, I have a returning guest, Edward Niedermeyer.

Ed is the author of Ludacris, the Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, and a co-host of the AtonoCast. He was also on the show in February of 2022, about a year ago, on episode 103, if you want to go back and listen to that one, where we also

talk about Tesla and Elon Musk and all these other topics. Now, it won't be a surprise to

you to hear that Tesla has been in the news a lot lately. Its share price fell off a cliff,

and there have been a lot of questions about the future of the company, not just around its

electric vehicles, but also around many of the other promises that Elon Musk has made over the years and, you know, increasingly more recently, in order to ensure that investors stayed interested in the company and that the share price would continue to go up.

But there seems to be a perfect storm brewing when we

look at the different factors that could be affecting Tesla in the years and months to come.

We can look at the growing competition that Tesla is facing from other automakers who are putting

out their own electric vehicles. We can look at the growing scrutiny into autopilot and Tesla's full self-driving system

that were claimed to, you know, allow the car to drive themselves, but never actually

allowed that to happen. And now more regulators and the Department of Justice, the Security

and Exchange Commission, and not to mention a number of lawsuits, are going to be

scrutinizing that question in the year to come. But on top of that, public opinion has also

been turning on Elon Musk. And since Tesla's value, since the interest in Tesla have been so

tied up in him and the cult that formed around him and the general kind of positive impression that

the public had of him that can also have consequences for Tesla. So I was very happy to have Ed

...