I guess, the word got out, or the economy got bad enough where suddenly lots of folks are doing it? Or the easiness of fencing the tailgates on social media is encouraging folks who wouldn’t know how to sell a catalytic converter to get into the “steal components” game? Not totally sure!

I am sure that it’s newly cropping up as a common problem. It’s all over the Tacoma subreddit, even the news is covering it (local news in Alameda covered a chop-shop bust that was targeting Tacomas specifically, and that was like, 2 days ago).

So yeah, I’m as mystified as you are. I explained the removable tailgate concept just for folks who maybe never drove a pickup truck or the many folks who don’t use that feature.

(Edit: and thanks for the dealership insights! I never drove any F-Series other than the F-150, so I had no idea how the heavy duty models handled tailgate features)

That’s brand new to me! Both the symbology and the magazine, and I love them both. Thanks!

No sweat, happy to help ID it :)

That was not the loudest laugh I’ve had today, but definitely the morally worst laugh I had today, so cheers XD

I should mention, my Spanish is good enough that I can say “Real Hasta La Muerte” does not mean just “Till Death.”

It means “Royal until death.”

And Royal (Real in Spanish) is the name of the largest football club out of Madrid, so there is a very high likelihood that it just means “I like this football club until I die.” Their symbol is a crown, which is separately claimed as a Tren de Agua symbol, and so Real fans might be gettin swept up in ICE raids in the USA.

It would be funny if the victims weren’t getting indefinite stays in a foreign gulag, but that is where it stands today.

That’s a 1920s Mercedes Roadster, I think. Unclear if a replica or original.

If for sale for $10,000:

1. I will buy it. Ain’t nothing on 4 wheels that will drive is for sale for 10K.
2. It must be the replica.

Disbanded!

… for effieciency!

Six.

BOBS BACK BABY

Savage, love it.

You’re thinking the EB-5 visa program, I think. That was the fifth “employment based” visa.

You’re sort of right, but your numbers are off. It’s $1.8 million in cash, but the real kicker is that you need to sustain those 10+ permanent US employees through your investments. Been a popular program since 1990, about 12,000 folks use it a year lately. It’s still a thing, you can apply for one today.

https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/permanent-workers/employment-based-immigration-fifth-preference-eb-5/about-the-eb-5-visa-classification

“Manipulated 2 sentences,” as in, they played a recording of him saying what he said.

No shit on that yikes. That blew my fucking mind.

Half the time when your AEB activates, you are unconscious or dazed and you’re just flailing around your cabin like a rag doll, because you’ve crashed. If your foot happens to flail into the accelerator, get ready for a very exciting (if short-lived) application of that impressive 0 to 60 time.

They call it the Model 3 because the Tesla Organ-Harvester didn’t translate well to Chinese

The new “Start Seeing Motorcycles” merch just dropped!

I don’t think anyone has reliable public data on miles travelled. If it existed, I would use it. The fact that it doesn’t exist tells you what you need to know about Level 2 ADAS system safety ;)

The only folks who are being real open with their data, near as I can tell, is Waymo. And Waymo has zero motorcycle fatalities, operating mostly in California, where the motorcycle driving culture is… absolutely fucking nuts uniquely risk-accepting.

My EMT career was both short lived and rewarding, right back at ya :)

Police report for 2024 case attached, it is also linked in the original article: https://www.opb.org/article/2025/01/15/tesla-may-face-less-accountability-for-crashes-under-trump/

It was Full Self Driving, according to the police. They know because they downloaded the data off the vehicle’s computer. The motorcyclist was killed on a freeway merge ramp.

All the rest is beyond my brief. Thought you might like the data to chew on, though.

Fair enough!

At least one of the fatalities is Full-Self Driving (it was cited by name in the police reports). The remainder are Autopilot. So, both systems kill motorcyclists. Tesla requests this data redacted from their NHTSA reporting, which specifically makes it difficult for consumers to measure which system is safer or if incremental safety improvements are actually being made.

You’re placing a lot if faith that the incremental updates are improvements without equivalent regressions. That data is specifically being concealed from you, and I think you should probably ask why. If there was good news behind those redactions, they wouldn’t be redactions.

I didn’t publish the software version data point because I agree with AA5B, it doesn’t matter. I honestly don’t care how it works. I care that it works well enough to safely cohabit the road with my manual transmission cromagnon self.

I’m not a “Tesla reporter,” I’m not trying to cover the incremental changes in their software versions. Plenty of Tesla fans doing that already. It only has my attention at all because it’s killing vulnerable road users, and for that analysis we don’t actually need to know which self-driving system version is killing people, just the make of car it is installed on.

My partner and I were actually debating that exact question before I posted it!

It’s just stock art, but of a rider in the Midwest. Custom exhaust, custom saddle and rack for that cafe racer look, and I just barely can’t make out the model on the engine fairing.

Here it is all big, let me know if you can figure it out: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-person-riding-a-motorcycle-on-a-city-street-kPfwWyUWubA

Looks hot, that’s why I picked it.