For what it's worth if you lose your brakes, downshift repeatedly until you are slow enough to find a softer landing zone. Rubbing tires up against the curb if there are no cars, bushes, rubbing up against the side of a hill, soft soil if available. If your car does not have an option to do this trade it in.
[Edit] I am not defending Elon or his orbiter zealots. Crazy evil stuff happens all the time but I think we are due some pictures and videos of the evidence. So far all we have is a story and things someone could have done to their own car. There are also a high prevalence of ring cameras that could capture his visitors. I can think of quite a few ways to put a person at risk in their car without such obvious things like cutting brake lines or wires of air bags which is so oddly specific. Usually whistleblowers die from "self inflicted" GSW's.
It’s quite obvious that this job was done by a professional if the allegations are true.
And I’m not personally about to doubt that our current government wouldn’t stoop to that level.
No, I am skeptical without pictures and videos. I've also replaced a lot of brakes. A picture is worth a thousand words.
The airbag system mods are pretty standard shitbox stuff. System goes off for whatever reason. Car is repaired. Sensors get tricked/fudged along the way because the owner doesn't want to put the money in (probably not worth it). Newer systems are more in depth and obnoxious to deal with so reading between the lines this is an older car which kinda also explains the brake thing.
Not that the government wouldn't do this but come on, they're not stealing your car to disassemble the front clip and monkey with the crash sensors and your brakes, they'll do something better than that.
Cutting someone’s brake line has to be one of the least reliable ways to injure or kill them. If you cut my brake line, you might bust up my garage door or my neighbor’s yard, but they’re not going to fail on cue as I go around a mountain curve…(dramatic music)
Nothing suspicious here
It also doesn't require a hard press, just enough,
I think it'd be fairly straight forward to damage the rubber hoses near the calipers so that failure was imminent but not immediate.
I can easily imagine that stepping on a brake pedal with cut lines and no assist doesn’t feel that weird.
Also, plenty of people are not really tuned in to how their cars feel.
I warm up my engine, to the point of annoying armchair quarterbacks on HN. If my brake line was cut it would be very obvious within seconds. Exception would be a partial cut that leave a millimeter of line not cut but that would take some serious skill and practice.
Now press the brake with moderate force, so it’s as far down as it goes easily in the no-boost state. Maintain that amount of force and start the car. (Do not do this experiment with the gas pedal! You are not trying to move the car!) You should hear the engine start and then, shortly thereafter, feel the pedal move farther down under the same amount of force. That’s the power brakes coming back online.
There’s no electronic magic here — the entire power brake system, on most cars, is entirely mechanical/hydraulic/pneumatic [0] with the possible exception of the antilock brakes and possible traction control. Neither of those will come into play when the car isn’t moving.
[0] Why pneumatic? Energy stored in a compressed or rarified fluid is proportional to the change in volume times the change in pressure. Hydraulics tolerate huge changes in pressure, but hydraulic fluids are highly incompressible, so the volume barely changes and the energy stored is tiny. Hydraulics can transport a lot of energy because then you have the pressure difference times the volume moved, but moving fluid from one cylinder to another does not change total volume. Gasses, on the other hand, allow huge volume changes. This is why it’s very safe to fill all the pipes in your house with water at 80 psi, but pipe manufacturers advise you very strongly not to fill the pipes with compressed air at pressures that high: you will store considerable energy in that air, and, if the pipe fails, it can release that energy rapidly.
Everything is "integral safety equipment" if you screech enough.
The people who are relocating to DC to make "it's really about serving your country" money working for DOGE while getting reamed by the local COL don't care. They're gonna be there a few years. They just need the $1700 04 Camry they're about to be the 9th owner of to have A/C and get them to work long enough for them to buy something real. Seriously, the DC area is full of this kind of stuff.
While the brake situation in TFA is sus, the airbags not working seems like the sort of typical thing that gets lost when the 5th owner crashes it, has his sketchy mechanic patch it up that way, drives it for another year, he tells the 6th owner. The 6th owner blows the engine up, doesn't think that's worth mentioning when he sells it as parts. The 7th owner is a flipper who fixes it and has no reason to look. Etc, etc. That sort of non-obvious stuff gets lost.
> but if other people are ever in the car they're going to rightfully expect you've at least got the safety equipment working to factory standard.
These are the kinds of cars where the passengers expect nothing and are pleasantly surprised.
p. 196, step 3: Firmly depress the brake pedal.
>Since then, Berulis has laid low. He filed a police report, included in the suit and viewed by WIRED, and had the car seen by a mechanic who, according to the report, found “that the driver-side front impact/airbag sensor had also been removed but noted that the remaining wires had been spliced together, completing the circuit in a manner that prevented the vehicle from detecting or logging the missing component, while also preventing the vehicle from activating its safety protocols, alerting the driver, or engaging limp mode.” The police report also indicates that fingerprints had been found on Berulis’ car.
Anything with push button start. It has been around a while.
And now let's talk about the epidemic of cancer in the Trump administration....
Pressing the clutch is a North American thing in my experience. All my other vehicles didn’t need it to start.
Yes, they should definitely prioritize posting pictures that only a fraction of a fraction of people will be able to understand or interpret at all, solely so that the people who want to pretend the accumulated things in the story didn't actually occur (or aren't that bad) can point to things they don't understand to naysay them. Brilliant.
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