Two firefighters were rushed to the hospital on Wednesday, after a Tesla parked in a family garage exploded.
According to local station KING5, the incident happened in the Seattle suburb of Auburn, after a massive fire spread from a family’s garage to the rest of their home.
The Tesla explosion set off what ultimately became a two-alarm fire, requiring emergency crews to battle back flames for hours. Thankfully, the two injured firefighters were discharged with non-life threatening injuries, and nobody else was hurt, though the single-family home was pretty much totaled.
The ultimate cause of the fire is still under investigation — whether the Tesla combusted on its own, setting off the blaze, or was the result of a fire which started elsewhere isn’t known.
Still, it’s fair to assume the explosion contributed to the severity of the fire, the latest example of an all-too-common situation plaguing Teslas and other electric vehicles.
Thanks to their massive lithium batteries, Teslas have an unfortunate habit of bursting into flames, often after being involved incollisions, but occasionally entirelyon theirown.
Regardless of what sparks the flames, battery fires are notoriously difficult to put out, requiring specialized hazmat units and thousands of gallons of water to end the battery’s combustion.
Self-driving trucks could be hauling cargo across highways in the near future. But not without the Teamsters having a say in the matter first.
As Politico reports, the California branch of the nation’s largest union is suing state lawmakers, accusing them of rushing out new regulations that’re friendly to the autonomous vehicle industry without considering their impact on workers’ jobs.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday, takes aim at several state agencies including the Department of Motor Vehicles, and governor Gavin Newsom’s administration. The union contends that the new regulations are an “existential threat” to hundreds of thousands of union jobs, and is demanding that the DMV should be blocked from enforcing the new rules.
“The DMV irresponsibly, carelessly, and unlawfully kept the public in the dark about the true economic and human costs of the amended Autonomous Vehicle regulations,” Julie Gutman Dickinson, an attorney representing the Teamsters, said in a statement, per Politico.
“The only way to protect the public’s right to properly scrutinize regulations that will transform transportation in California is for the Court to order the DMV to immediately rescind the illegally enacted regulations,” Gutman added.
At the crux of the suit, the Teamsters say that the DMV didn’t conduct a mandatory economic study to gauge the effects of the new regulations. Instead, the lawmakers expediently used a process meant to fast-track minor updates that have minimal economic impact, they allege.
The DMV, puzzlingly, calculated that no jobs would be eliminated by self-driving trucks. Fat chance, according to the Teamsters: by its own count, over 200,000 semi-truck drivers could be put out of work.
The Teamsters also raised the danger posed by allowing computer systems to control a vehicle weighing tens of thousands of pounds, compared to the smaller threat posed by a robotaxi. A Tesla Semi — a vehicle that’s envisioned as having autonomous driving capabilities — was involved in a grisly crash that killed two people, though it doesn’t appear that self-driving features were being tested at the time of the accident.
For certain BMW owners, enormous car payments aren’t the only rude reminder that they don’t actually own their ride yet: now, irritating in-vehicle commercials will send them the same message.
Starting last week, the German automaker started blasting a promotion for the new Spider-Man movie into its customers’ cars without warning — because nothing says riding in luxury like a full-vehicle pop-up ad. BMW, showing that it was about as in-touch as its drivers are familiar with turn signals, teased the promotion as a “special surprise.”
According to The Autopian‘s coverage and the heaps of complaints online, the ad appears on the center console screen when you start up the car. When the ad’s done playing — a cheap looking animation that doesn’t come close to warranting all this hubbub — it even has the gall to ask you to scan a QR code.
While it does give you the option to play or skip the “festive animation,” it’s still an annoying extra step drivers have to take before pulling up the map they need or the music they want to listen to. It’s also a breach of trust: drivers keep their cars connected so they receive critical software updates, not unexpectedly see ads when they’re trying to hit the road.
Few owners were pleased. Enthusiasts in the r/BMW subreddit had a veritable meltdown when someone posted footage of the ad playing on their infotainment system.
“BMW should stop with this sh*t,” one user fumed.
“F*ck everything about this,” another said.
According to a BMW press release, this latest ad campaign has been available in more than 70 markets since July 27 and is scheduled to keep playing through August 10.
If any automaker would have the temerity to pull a shameless stunt like this, it’d be BMW, which has a history of monetizing the digital and hardware features in its cars with video game-style microtransactions. It previously demanded customers pay a monthly subscription fee to unlock their heated seats that were already installed in their vehicles, and an additional fee for heated steering wheels.
It also tried paywalling the widely popular Apple CarPlay and Android Auto smartphone integration features — something no other automaker charges for — but backed off after massive backlash.
It’s not the only carmaker that’s gotten into hot water for repurposing infotainment screens into ad real estate. Last year, Jeep drivers were livid after the company’s vehicles started showing giant pop-up ads that badgered them into buying an extended warranty.
In a federal lawsuit reported by The Independent, Javier Medrano accused Tesla of turning its autonomous test fleet in Houston into 24/7 “rolling hazards” by “aggressively” scaling up operations.
The size of the fleet more than doubled to a size that Medrano claims was impossible to oversee on his own,. Despite consistently pleading higher-ups for more help, he alleges his warnings were ignored, and he was later fired.
“It almost feels like these big corporations can get away with anything, and people just kind of put their heads down and say, ‘Well, this is how it is,'” Medrano told The Independent. “And it breeds an environment where people don’t say, ‘This is not okay.'”
Medrano took over as the sole operational manager of Houston’s FSD test fleet eight months after joining the company in 2023. When he joined, the size of its fleet and human operators was just 15. But months later, Tesla increased it to 38 vehicle operators. These employees kept the cars running for 24 hours a day across three shifts, and Medrano, as remote fleet manager, oversaw them all.
This “dangerous 38:1 operator-to-manager ratio,” the suit argues, violated Tesla’s own “mandated 15:1 safety baseline.”
These operators, by the way, were part of Tesla’s controversial “Rodeo Team,” whose existence was first made public in reporting from Business Insider in 2024. The moniker is fitting: these drivers purposely got their autonomous cars into dangerous situations and only intervened at the last possible moment, providing Tesla valuable training data.
The lawsuit claims that in other cities with Rodeo Teams, Tesla had more than one safety lead. Having to oversee this sprawling fleet self-driving daredevils was wearing Medrano down to a nub. In one email to his boss, he confessed he was “trying not to lose my absolute mind, from not sleeping or eating correctly and doing everything I need to do to actually meet the expectations,” per the Independent. A month later, he begged for another safety lead and asked for a week off.
“This is officially my S.O.S signal,” he wrote.
Inevitably, all this foreshadowing came to a head. Just days after sending that message, one of the FSD vehicles was involved in a collision with another car. The test driver, following protocol, called Medrano after the accident, at the late hour of 2:05 AM.
But Medrano was so exhausted that he answered the phone call while “physically asleep,” according to the complaint, causing him to give erroneous advice to the operator. Following his orders, she remained at the scene of the accident, where she was allegedly approached by an impaired stranger.
Medrano told HR the next day he had “no recollection” of the phone call, per The Independent. He then echoed his complaints of “severe understaffing” he’d made to his boss.
The response he apparently got was baffling and callous. An HR rep allegedly told Medrano to set his phone on “Do Not Disturb” mode if he didn’t want to be bothered during active testing shifts. And the Autopilot director said he should’ve “delegated” better.
But, he told The Indepedent, “I didn’t have anybody to delegate to.”
“I was really trying to let them know how serious this was,” Medrano added. “But there was no sense of urgency.”
“It’s baffling to me how this went on so long,” he continued. “In other cities, they had multiple leads per shift. I was the only one who didn’t have that luxury… Our job is to make sure these cars are safe on the road.”
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