There's Already a Class-Action Lawsuit Over Tesla Laughing at Your Videos

The lawsuit, filed by Henry Yeh, a San Francisco resident who owns Tesla’s Model Y, alleges that Tesla employees were able to access the images and videos for their “tasteless and tortious entertainment” and “the humiliation of those surreptitiously recorded.”

“Like anyone would be, Mr. Yeh was outraged at the idea that Tesla’s cameras can be used to violate his family’s privacy, which the California Constitution scrupulously protects,” Jack Fitzgerald, an attorney representing Yeh, said in a statement to Reuters.

“Tesla needs to be held accountable for these invasions and for misrepresenting its lax privacy practices to him and other Tesla owners,” Fitzgerald said.

Tesla did not immediately respond to Reuters request for comment.

The lawsuit said Tesla’s conduct is “particularly egregious” and “highly offensive.”

It said Yeh was filing the complaint “against Tesla on behalf of himself, similarly-situated class members, and the general public.” The complaint said the prospective class would include individuals who owned or leased a Tesla within the past four years.

The REV is “what we’re here to celebrate and talk about, but it’s expensive,” Ram CEO Mike Koval Jr. told sibling publication Automotive News. “That’s the elephant in the room for everybody. The cost of electrification is expensive, so for sure we need to make sure that we protect the profitability of our current in-market [internal combustion engine] business to help fund the transition to electrification.” [...]

“The question is, how do we tackle those additional costs,” Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares said at a media roundtable last week. “If we don’t do it, we are just going to have a significant reduction of the size of the market because [the] middle class will not be able to buy EVs, very simply put. So it is not in the interest of the corporations. It’s not in the interest of the citizens. It’s not in the interest of the unions that we shrink the market because we become too pricey for the middle classes.”

“Affordability is becoming an issue, so we’re feeling some pressure on the pricing,” Koval said. “But so far, we’ve resisted the temptation to resort to bad habits.

J.D. Power Canada total Automotive News Canada, for example, that the average monthly payment for a full-size truck in Canada now stands above $1,000.

“Fortunately for me, my demand is so high around the world outside of North America, I can move my cars. If things slow down in the U.S., Canada was up, Mexico’s up, fleet was up. It was just U.S. retail is a little rocky.”

The new factory, where Tesla will manufacture its high-capacity battery for energy storage, is scheduled to break ground in the third quarter this year and start production in the second quarter of 2024, Chinese state media Xinhua News Agency reported Sunday. The amount of Tesla’s investment wasn’t immediately clear.

Tesla posted a photo of a signing ceremony in a tweet and said it plans to produce 10,000 Megapack units every year. That is equal to about 40 gigawatt hours of energy storage, and the product will be sold worldwide, Xinhua said. A Megapack unit can store enough energy to power an average of 3,600 homes for one hour, according to Tesla.

There is no doubt that April will see a good recovery in sales growth, Cui Dongshu, the association’s secretary general, told reporters, citing a low base in the corresponding period last year.

China imposed strict COVID-19 lockdowns in major cities, such as its commercial hub of Shanghai, in April 2022.

Prices of NEVs have been falling fast, thanks to discounting and tumbling battery costs, stepping up pressure on internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles and the legacy brands behind them.

More than 40 brands have joined a price war started by Tesla this year, among them Nissan, Toyota and Volkswagen, which have started offering aggressive discounts on their best-selling ICE models to defend market share.

While it’s not unusual for carmakers and dealers to give out incentives to clear inventory of older models, it’s the quarter’s exceptional intensity that’s sparked social media discussion and raised concerns among analysts about shrinking profit margins, not to mention potential compromises to quality and innovation. The long-term sustainability of some automakers is even coming into question.

Tesla’s shares plunged 6.1% earlier this month on concern that significant price cuts early this year have only yielded an incremental gain in vehicle sales.

China’s Association of Automobile Manufacturers, meanwhile, has called for an end to the price war, saying it isn’t a long-term solution to a slowdown in sales and accumulation of stock. The industry body has urged a “return to normal operation” to ensure the auto market’s healthy development.

What’s worrying is that it remains unclear whether some of the carmakers that have desperately placed their hopes on price cuts and cash incentives to spur sales actually have an exit plan. Is this just a race to the bottom and let the bankrupt carcasses pile up? There’s also the concern that spoiled customers may resist a return to normal pricing, which may result in a distorted market.

“This is just the beginning,” Avery Broderick, physicist at the Perimeter Institute and the University of Waterloo said during a National Science Foundation press conference. Researchers are anticipating doing “amazing science” by “studying this image closely and repeating this story,” he said.

Black holes are places in space so dense, with such immense gravity, that beyond a certain boundary called the “event horizon,” light cannot escape. Using a technique called very long baseline interferometry, eight telescopes around the world were able to collect data from the black hole at the center of the galaxy M87 back in 2017. Researchers combined radio-wave data from each telescope, creating the image. While the final image is not a photograph and required significant data analysis and modeling to create, several independent techniques were used to process the data, and the shadow always remained in the final images, according to one of the papers.

Most importantly, this image once again proves that the main theory that physicists use to explain the force of gravity, the theory of general relativity, is correct. Yale astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan told Gizmodo in an email that the picture also offers the strongest evidence yet that what we’ve long thought about galaxies is true—that they contain supermassive black holes at their centers that contain points-of-no-return for light, called event horizons. In short, they’re not just big dense balls, but something scarier.