FURTHER TO OUR PREVIOUS STORY musing on whether there may be a conspiracy against Tesla, more information has come to light.
In 2016, several complaints were filed with the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) claiming a possible problem with the suspension on Tesla Model S.
The NHTSA did not find any safety issue with Tesla suspensions. Elon Musk then tweeted his suspicions that there was more to the story, claiming that 37 of the 40 suspension complaints to the NHTSA were fraudulent using false locations or vehicle identification numbers.
Tesla strongly implied that the blogger behind the original post could have had a financial incentive.
The first allegations were in a story by Edward Niedermeyer in the Daily Kanban (an online auto newspaper of unknown provenance), drawing comparisons to GM’s cover-up of its ignition switch scandal. As a result of that story, Tesla stock fell 4.6 percent.
“We don’t know if Mr. Niedermeyer’s motivation is simply to set a world record for axe-grinding or whether he or his associates have something financial to gain by negatively affecting Tesla’s stock price, but it is important to highlight that there are several billion dollars in short sale bets against Tesla. This means that there is a strong financial incentive to greatly amplify minor issues and to create false issues from whole cloth.”
Now, here’s where it gets even more interesting: the complaints didn’t come from Tesla owners!
The finger points at a mysterious Australian called Keith Leech (also known as Keef Wivaneff and other aliases).
According to his website (promoting his $157 e-book, paid chats and even “sneak previews of his book” for $16 or $31, but available on Amazon for $19.95 as a paperback or $2.44 on Kindle), Keith Leech is a 65-year-old retired electronic engineer (or was in 2016). He appears to be on a crusade to call out so-called green scams, starting with a new type of solar collector called the SunBall.
In his campaign against Tesla, Leech has gathered and shared pictures of crashed Tesla Model S vehicles. From these, he came to the conclusion that the crashes had something to do with the suspension – he questioned the advisability of using cast suspension parts. Using these pictures, he also filed complaints with the NHTSA and referred to these complaints in his online comments, without disclosing that he had, in fact, filed the complaints himself.
In one of his complaints, he alleges that the Tesla suspension is “not strong enough and constitutes a danger to all road users”. He makes this assertion based on his own analysis of pictures of the crashed car, but with no details of the circumstances of the crash.
The push for electric vehicles is facing some strong and increasingly organised opposition.
Billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch backed a group of lobbyists with the stated aim of “boosting petroleum-based transportation fuels and attacking government subsidies for electric vehicles”. The group has been courting oil companies for funding. The Koch brothers have considerable investments in oil and mining.
In another strange case, an article appeared on a web magazine calling Musk a “faux-free marketeer and a national disgrace”. Two days later another article on a different website claimed Musk “stole $5 billion in taxpayer dollars”. Two days later, another article appeared on a third website, calling out Musk for “blow(ing) up taxpayer money with Falcon 9”. All carried the bye-line Shepard Stewart. According to the best sources (including the editors of the websites), there is no such person as “Shepard Stewart”.