Ludicrous by Edward Niedermeyer

Author:Edward Niedermeyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
Published: 2019-06-26T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

DEFECTS, DISCLOSURE, AND DRAMA

The word “recall” needs to be recalled.

Elon Musk, in a since-deleted tweet from January 2014

Sometime in early 2014, Keith Leech was looking through pictures of wrecked Tesla Model S vehicles at an auction house website when he started noticing a pattern: in almost every photo, the car’s wheels had sheared off from the suspension. Once he noticed it, he started to see it in nearly every picture of a wrecked Tesla he could find. Eventually he started an album on the photo-sharing site Flickr, dubbing the collection “whompy wheels.” Thus a one-man crusade was born.

Leech says he hadn’t set out to look for safety problems with Teslas. Several years earlier, when he’d been building a solar panel system for his off-the-grid home in the Australian bush, he discovered something called the “SunCube” on the internet. The SunCube’s creator promised it would revolutionize solar energy generation, and at first Leech was taken in, but as time went on, it became clear that there was no actual product. In the online confrontations that followed, the SunCube’s inventor called Leech a fraud and a criminal; Leech sued him for defamation and won. The SunCube, which had secured an AUD$450,000 contract with the South Australian government, collapsed into bankruptcy and infamy. For his part, Leech had found a new hobby: uncovering green scams.

As one of the most high-profile green companies at the time, Tesla quickly hit Leech’s radar screen, but his initial investigation was simply looking at the company’s environmental claims. When he noticed the broken wheels and suspensions, however, he was sure he’d found his next SunCube. Though he didn’t have an engineering degree, he had done a mechanical and electrical engineering apprenticeship through the UK Ministry of Aviation and considered himself an “eyeball engineer.” Given the weight of the Model S and its use of cast aluminum suspension components, which he knew was unusual due to its brittleness and tendency to casting defects, he smelled a problem.

Convinced that the Model S was underengineered and poorly manufactured, Leech launched a one-man online campaign to document what he saw as evidence of a dangerous problem. As his Flickr folder of images of Model S vehicles with broken suspensions and “whompy wheels” grew, and he became more certain he had uncovered a public danger, he began to post warnings on various Tesla forums, even reporting potential failures to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s complaint database.

Though Leech only comes across as somewhat eccentric on the telephone, his quirky usernames, trollish turns of phrase, and combative persistence can make him come across as downright crazy on the internet. When his crusade collided with the paranoid, defensive culture of Tesla forums, the combination was explosive. Leech played right into the stereotype of an anti-green provocateur spreading anti-electric car “FUD” on behalf of shadowy forces. The immediate hostility of the forums in turn triggered Leech’s inner bulldog, and each time he was banned, he’d just register a new username and go right back to it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.