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Well folks, we’ve seen a lot of wild wrecks at King of the Hammers, but this one? This one is special. In what can only be described as a world record for fastest off-road DNF, a Tesla Cybertruck met its untimely end in the parking lot… before a single rock was crawled or dune was hooned. See the photos!

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Nothing quite says “high-performance muscle car” like a popup ad for a Mopar Extended Warranty covering your whole center console. That’s right, Dodge Charger owners are now experiencing an exciting new feature: pop-up ads that appear every time the vehicle stops at a light. This absolute garbage feature was spotted in the wild, take a look here.

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Nothing quite says “high-performance muscle car” like a popup ad for a Mopar Extended Warranty covering your whole center console. That’s right, Dodge Charger owners are now experiencing an exciting new feature: pop-up ads that appear every time the vehicle stops at a light. This absolute garbage feature was spotted in the wild, take a look here.

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The data coming out from an independent study of Waymo autonomous vehicles is, frankly, amazing. Swiss Re, one of the largest global insurance firms based out of Zürich, reports that 25.3 million fully autonomous miles drive by Waymo vehicles resulted in a 92% reduction in car crash injuries.

In plain English, Waymo self-driving tech is 12.5x safer than human drivers.

Let's dig into what that means!

[-] KayLeadfoot@fedia.io 9 points 3 days ago

I can't say that it is certainly fraud.

... But I can certainly say that Tesla has historically never come close to registering that sort of single weekend sales performance while taking advantage of the iZEV program in Canada :)

For some reason, their most lucrative rebate performance came after Elon's controversial backing of a US president who, among other things, is calling for the annexation of Canada under the threat of economic (and maybe military?) ramifications.

How about that! You would think that would be really unpopular to be associated with, seeing as how Canadians have a proudly independent streak. It's causing ~50-75% drops in sales in politically-similar NATO states. Then, just in Canada, that talk apparently coincided with huge sales gains, and just as the EV rebate program was due to run out of funds. Strange!

These next few weeks are going to be really interesting as the Canadian Transportation Minister confirms the details on that rebate program, like she has stated she intends to.

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submitted 4 days ago by KayLeadfoot@fedia.io to c/news@beehaw.org

Between January 10 and January 12, after being warned that an EV rebate program was running out of funds, Tesla dealerships in Canada managed to claim 8,669 individual iZEV EV rebates, or about $43 million CAD in incentives.

Meanwhile, 200 other auto dealerships across Canada are left holding the bag for millions worth of rebates that Transport Canada may not be able reimburse after the funds ran out, according to excellent reporting in the Toronto Star.

At least the Canadian government is paying attention. Transport Minister Anita Anand is personally looking into it. She stated:

_

“I am disappointed. This report is unacceptable and I am asking the department that is responsible for administering this program to provide me with detailed and complete information.”

_

So what happened here? And how did the iZEV program run out of funds so quickly?

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The real feature here is buried in Ford's patent filing: it can detect your dog, and feed that information to an automated treat dispenser. If you have to pop into the store, and Rover starts barking, the machine will know and can automatically become dog’s best friend! Or you can absolutely blow your dog’s mind by manually giving them a treat, but through an app, rather than by hand.

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Updated with video from reporters on-site at the bottom of the post! Late Sunday night, four Tesla Cybertrucks caught fire in a Seattle holding lot near 2nd Ave S & S Spokane St, just five minutes from the local Tesla dealership. Initially, reports indicated two burning Cybertrucks, but as the fire spread, the number grew to 4 Cybertrucks. Investigators have offered no details as to whether this was arson or another case of a Tesla Cybertruck bursting into flames spontaneously. See video from the scene in the full article.

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Between January 10 and January 12, after being warned that an EV rebate program was running out of funds, Tesla dealerships in Canada managed to claim 8,669 individual iZEV EV rebates, or about $43 million CAD in incentives. That’s a staggering number of sales to log in a single weekend, about 1.5 sales per minute. Let's dig into the numbers.

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In covering car news, I will sometimes look at a new piece of technology and do a double take. “That can’t be real, it is simply too stupid for a room of automotive engineers to have signed off on it.” Often times, those pieces of tech are on Stellantis vehicles.

Here’s a winner that I had to confirm was real (spoilers, it is real). Popup ads in your car… for the Mopar extended warranty service.

Take a look, it’s the whole bleeping infotainment screen, every time you stop.

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submitted 1 week ago by KayLeadfoot@fedia.io to c/videos@lemmy.world

Tesla’s Cybertruck just made its grand debut at Mardi Gras 2025, and, well… it didn’t go great. Watch the Video: The Crowd Was Not Having It A group of Cybertrucks rolled through the Orpheus Parade, a generally tame, family-friendly event known for marching bands, fabulous floats, and an all-around good time. But when the small […]

[-] KayLeadfoot@fedia.io 47 points 1 week ago

I went zero to sixty, STRAIGHT into tears. You need to put some warnings on this stuff, man!

Beautiful and poignant and dark as a dirge. But fuck, warn me first.

[-] KayLeadfoot@fedia.io 11 points 1 week ago

A retired firefighter mentioned that her department was using something very interesting - these are flood control barricades, think plastic sandbags.

You put up the barricades, and then use that to make a sort of moat, fill it with water, and you basically build the water tank around the burning EV.

This page shows the concept, site's in India, but this is being done in the western hemisphere some places, too: https://www.floodbarriers.in/ev_fire_fighting.php

[-] KayLeadfoot@fedia.io 7 points 1 week ago

Ya know, we actually don't use fire blankets where I'm at! The training videogame also made no mention of them, and it is very recent, released last year.

Interesting, right? There's a huge amount of variation for firefighting techniques nationwide for EVs. I've seen them used, but only out West.

As for confusing backdraft and flashover, no, I got that correct. To the best of my admittedly very spotty memory :)

See this article, it means different things different places, how I learned it is that every backdraft is a flashover, but not every flashover is a backdraft. If that's wrong, take it up with the lieutenant who trained me, who was incidentally stellar at his job: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backdraft

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We saw an interesting press release from the National Fire Protection Association, they released an EV firefighting video game for free with the help of a private developer and a Department of Energy grant. So far, more than a million firefighters have used the game to learn about fighting EV fires.

Well, that pitch was irresistible to us. We wanted to know more about how EVs work in emergencies, and we get to play video games to do it? Awesome, count me in, let the games begin. Here's how the game plays and what we learned from it.

[-] KayLeadfoot@fedia.io 7 points 2 weeks ago

If you only ever drove Fords, you would think "AGUGGUUUG" was a natural sound for an automatic to make 😂That's innovation, Tesla should take notes!

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Thought y'all might find this interesting, if you like automotive tech.

We all know automakers want to keep tabs on their cars. Stolen vehicle tracking? Sure. Fleet management? Fine. Microphone eavesdropping to serve more ads? Hate it, but OK, that’s a thing.

Hold onto your tin-foil hats: Ford just published a patent for something that takes vehicle tracking into full-blown Twilight Zone territory.

(If this sort of post is unwelcome, just let me know and I can remove it, or y'all can remove it with no worries.)

[-] KayLeadfoot@fedia.io 13 points 2 weeks ago

Love the versioning. Saw minor edits to the "Fork in the Road" landing page over time, including the cleaning up of just plain sloppy typos. They clearly deployed half-cocked, didn't even run spell-check.

[-] KayLeadfoot@fedia.io 3 points 2 weeks ago

TL;DR: Yes, it is shit.

[-] KayLeadfoot@fedia.io 2 points 2 weeks ago

I think it's news cycle in this case. Felt like how a looter would fire the department, "wait until nightfall" deal

[-] KayLeadfoot@fedia.io 22 points 3 weeks ago

That's more than 1 brake check per hour at the speed they were testing the system at.

[-] KayLeadfoot@fedia.io 2 points 3 weeks ago

Since I'm half-intelligent, I won't pretend to understand most what you're saying here.

I don't think the article linked is nonsense, though. It certainly isn't leftist anything, miss me with that.

But... importantly... There is a statistically correct way to complete the following sentence:

"The Tesla Cybertruck is ______ times more/less explosive than the Ford Pinto."

If you disagree with my answer to that question, what is your answer? I showed my math, I even invite the readers to re-run the equation. If you re-run it, what do you come up with? I bet your answer will be informative and helpful to the conversation about EV safety, two elements that are the "sugar," "spice," and "everything nice" about good reporting.

[-] KayLeadfoot@fedia.io 2 points 3 weeks ago

Hey, boss... If you say my name and don't knock on wood, I show up.

This place seems nice! I might post here in the future.

I do not hate EVs. Read my reviews of the Tesla Model 3, the new Dodge Charger EV, and the F-150 Lightning. If you don't like to read, the TL;DR is that I very much like each vehicle. Like many pickup truck people, I specifically do not like the Cybertruck, but that's because it's a lousy vehicle.

You should keep an open mind - just because you disagree with me, doesn't mean I have some unreasonable bias. I may have followed evidence to a different conclusion.

I do smile when Tesla fans ask me to announce my name. I already did! I'm Kay Leadfoot. You can learn more about me on my About page, which has definitely been there since Day 1. Unrelated to anything, please don't call me dude.

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KayLeadfoot

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