The first NHTSA recall is for airbags installed torn and undetected during manufacturing (SB-24-20-001). Ok, technically the number reveals that was issued in late 2024, so does it still count if it’s only ever seen in 2025?
Planned Owner Notification Date: FEB 21, 2025
The actual first NHTSA recall is for a camera circuit board short, which can cause the rear view screen to fail (SB-25-00-001).
Honda innovation was hinted at last year’s CES:
And the reputable brand has more than delivered in 2025.
Their new Zero EV as reported by Verge is amazeballs in both looks and trustworthy innovations in engineering.
Honda says Honda Zero embodies three principles: “thin, light, and wise.” At CES, Honda executives said they were focused on showing off the “wise” principle.
That includes a new, in-house-developed operating system called Asimo OS, named after the company’s Asimo humanoid robot from the early 2000s that was designed for “people’s daily lives.”
Honda retired Asimo in 2018 to focus on “more practical” applications. But the company retained a lot of information from the more than 33.26 million steps the robot took over its lifetime about some of the stumbling blocks and safety issues a fully autonomous robot would have to overcome. When Honda unveiled Asimo in 2000, it was widely heralded as both a beloved friend (which once played soccer with President Barack Obama and could autonomously recognize a human wave as well as moving objects) and a symbol of Japanese technological advancement.
That little robot didn’t just take 33.26 million steps, it was learning how not to fall flat on its face, which turns out to be pretty dang important when you’re building self-driving cars.
And more notably the ‘friend’ vision of AI agents isn’t just feel-good marketing. That’s the correct moral framing for our inevitable augmented future. It’s not your servant, it’s not your exploitable dislocated double or digital twin working in apartheid data mining depths hidden and unknown to you. It’s your verifiable friend worth caring about because it cares about you, in the same way trust works with “true” friends today.
Way to go Honda!
This intelligent EV, coupled with their battery revolution just announced, means Honda Zero is far more than another pretty face in the EV crowd. For thoughtful consumers and transit planners, this might be the one to watch. Finally – 2030 zero emission and fatality targets that don’t feel like creepy technologist-white-supremacist fan fiction.
And for everyone saying ‘but where’s my 1980s Civic with electric motors’ I hear you.
Here’s the deal: Go look at what happened with GM’s Electrovette and Electrovair programs.
Then read about Nissan’s Lektrikar, or the AC Propulsion (the actual Tesla technology inventors) Toyota eBox. Then put some serious money up for retro-fit electric kits to keep older combustion cars on the road but instead powered by modern (solid-state) batteries. That’s the most literal path to what you seek.
Why hasn’t the market gone there? Simple. American economics are geared towards heavily subsidized throwaway big new exotics instead of long repair and retro-fit sensibly designed affordables.
In other words, this is bigger than just old and new car concepts. America always intentionally oriented towards an emphasis on the high-cost-of-maintenance private carriage because it inherently required lots of privilege, as a way of legitimizing literal social barriers to entry (no money, no movement, like the days of royalty and horse drawn carriages). Since the Model T (and Ford’s overt hate speech that put his extremist racist pamphlet on the seat of every new car) it’s been a not very secret strategy of market-manipulated discrimination against those historically pushed into poverty.
For those wondering why we’re talking social history in a piece about a fancy new EV, hang onto your hat…
Why do you think jaywalk laws were so cynically invented? Here’s a hint: it wasn’t about safety. It was about criminalizing pedestrian movement, especially in low income neighborhoods where crosswalks are delayed or denied.
Oh how time flies.
So many things he said that were so wrong then, and even more wrong now…
“So if the person and their luggage, life support, and consumption” is accounted for, he said, “ultimately it could drop below $100,000.” A trip to Mars on ITS would take about 80 days. […] Musk wants the trips to Mars to be yearly, if not more frequently, and to start colonization in 2022
I mean the 2016 SpaceX money slide called “Next Steps” said Mars travel would be all done and dusted by 2024, 30 day rides at $100K.
Why are we even still here on earth?
In 2017 he doubled down on the pitch.
SpaceX’s previous plan called for landing its first transport ship on Mars in 2022. The timeline Musk gave today was similar; two cargo landers would land on Mars in 2022, with four vehicles launching in 2024. Two of those 2024 ships would be crewed, meaning, in Musk’s timeline, humans could walk on Mars in just seven years.
“That’s not a typo,” he said.
You may remember 2013 when he laid out these numbers:
Musk envisages a colony with 80,000 people on the red planet.
Of course that didn’t sound preposterous enough, so a couple years later he was puffing even harder.
Musk says a sustainable colony of 1 million people could be established in about 40 to 100 years.
His sudden escalation from 80,000 to 1 million colonists seems to follow a pattern common in financial bubbles. When initial ambitious claims fail to materialize, even more extreme promises are made to maintain attention and investment. This mirrors tactics seen in other ventures where missing deadlines leads to even grander future predictions rather than realistic reassessment.
What’s driving all this nonsense? A misunderstanding about regulations.
…recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities. Accordingly, Disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement.
It’s hard to believe Musk actually gets away with statements of this nature.
“It should probably be easier to remove a law than create one,” said Musk. “I think that’s probably good, because laws have infinite life unless they’re taken away.”
Apparently that’s not how anything actually works. It’s so dumb as to be painful to think about. Laws are the opposite to what is described, because they are:
Making laws “easier to remove than create” and Mars being free from “Earth-based government” authority suggest an attempt to frame space exploration in terms of escaping public oversight rather than serving public interests… but I’m not a lawyer.
I do know however that NASA safely landed two drones on Mars (Spirit and Opportunity) in January 2004 and this guy can’t even get one ship there by 2024 to declare Martian law.
Those missions succeeded 20 years ago using technology far less advanced than what’s available today. Yet even with modern advantages, basic milestones of private Mars exploration remain unmet. This suggests the core challenges aren’t primarily technical but rather stem from the fundamental mismatch between public relations promises and physical/economic realities.
NASA’s successful missions, built on careful scientific research and public accountability, stand in stark contrast to the extremely wasteful, bombastic but undelivered private sector promises.
More to the point, he sucks at delivering on his most basic promises that are only a couple or few years into the future. Why does anyone think he could deliver something even further away and more sophisticated?
Even worse, “free planet” rhetoric reveals the fundamental contradiction behind the fraud. Claiming independence from Earth governance hides how these private space ventures remain heavily dependent on public sector research, funding, and infrastructure. Such extremist anti-government political framing of space exploration often obscures its reliance on collective public investment and institutional knowledge.
Perhaps it’s time for accountability in private space ventures, reviewing how public resources and attention get directed based on false promises and fantasy schemes rather than demonstrated capabilities. The real damage isn’t just wasted resources, it’s a targeted erosion of public trust and diversion away from actual scientific progress to publicity-driven fantasies.
The Mars colony promises really are a reflection of other ventures like the Hyperloop and Tesla’s self-driving capabilities.
This totally unhinged snake-oil salesman nonsense has actually harmed legitimate technology development by creating unrealistic public expectations, diverting resources from methodical scientific approaches, undermining trust, promoting a false narrative about private sector efficiency.
The pattern is consistent: announce extremely aggressive timelines, miss them completely, then make even grander promises rather than acknowledge the original overreach. The timeline above should be particularly damning in how it shows escalation rather than learning.
In the aftermath of the Las Vegas Cybertruck incident and the death of decorated Green Beret Matt Livelsberger (stationed in Germany, on approved leave), Elon Musk’s social media response reveals a calculated break in his established pattern of behavior. While his posts mocking the deceased service member align with his typical attacks on critics, his conspicuous silence on technical aspects suggests deeper implications.
A Documented Pattern of “Alien Technology” Claims
For years, Musk has strategically and repeatedly deployed “alien technology” claims to generate attention and shape high-profile narratives around Tesla and SpaceX.
As far back as 2016 we see Tweets like this one:
Space X and Tesla entrepreneur Elon Musk has stoked the fires of conspiracy theories by saying he has “not ruled out” the idea that a UFO caused a Space X rocket to explode. [An “alien hunter” allegedly replied] “Just lucky the aliens destroyed it, before it started WWIII.”
Then in Dec 2017 he infamously tweeted about Air Force Base launching a SpaceX rocket:
Nuclear alien UFO from North Korea.
On a 2019 Q4 earnings call he announced:
Speaking about Tesla’s next-level powertrain, Musk says, “… [it’s] mind blowing I think. Yes. Coming out later this year, end of the year probably, that’s our goal. Get powertrain up [by] end of the year and then it’s going to be like — this is like alien technology, it’s insane…. Tesla is all about hardcore engineering.”
There was nothing notable that followed that claim, other than Tesla stock price jumping for fake news.
Then in July 2020, he tweeted:
Aliens built the pyramids obv
Most significantly, in May 2021, he made an extraordinary claim connecting SpaceX and Tesla capabilities in an allegedly now-deleted tweet that suggests consciousness of potential regulatory violations:
With SpaceX thruster option, Tesla Roadster will be able to do 0-60 mph in 1.1 seconds. Alien technology works!
This was followed up in September 2021:
I’m not saying there are UFOs … but there are UFOs
This pattern continued through 2024. In November, he declared on social media:
SpaceX is alien-level technology.
Then, in an eerily similar message to Livelsberger’s final communications, Musk was quoted in December 2024:
…his ambition to send crews to Mars as soon as 2028 would result in “alien-level technology that is crushingly better than competitors,” along with making an oblique reference to averting a war against China.
That comment is just too similar to Livelsberger’s own communication right before his suicide to be coincidental. Was the Green Beret under the impression he was helping Musk (and Trump) by bringing attention to the threat from “alien-level technology”? His communication also asked everyone to rally around these two. Consider this when observing a clear shift from Musk’s years of cavalier “alien technology” claims to his sudden, uncharacteristic silence on technical aspects after Livelsberger gave his own life to draw attention to Musk’s statements.
That 2028 timeline claim by Musk also is notable, given his long habit of breaking promises and failing to deliver. In 2016, Musk barked loudly about being on Mars by 2018:
…you should pay attention to the April 27, [2016] announcement from Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, that he intends to launch his first unmanned Mars mission in just two years and will beat NASA’s goal of putting astronauts on the surface in the 2030s by up to a decade.
We see now he hasn’t been beating NASA’s timeline at all. He’s only lowered standards to the point where anything goes. Systematically dismantling safety regulations by privatizing aerospace has caused a series of catastrophic unaccountable explosions and dangerous quality failures. Levelsberger blowing up Tesla/SpaceX tech after talking about alien-like gravitic propulsion… was tragically on brand.
The Counternarrative: Deliberate Contradiction
Simultaneous to alien tech promotion, Musk maintains a contradictory stance. In March 2021, he tweeted about a lack of UFO evidence, posting a chart with exponential camera resolution improvement over time next to alien picture resolution remaining flat:
Strongest argument against aliens
At the Milken Institute Global Conference in May 2024, he stated:
I’ve not seen any evidence of aliens. And SpaceX, with the Starlink constellation, has roughly 6,000 satellites, and not once have we had to maneuver around a UFO… Never. So I’m like, okay, I don’t see any evidence of aliens.
Tellingly, just months before the Vegas incident, in October 2024, Musk explicitly connected alien technology claims to classified programs, raising serious questions about his use of government-restricted information to promote his companies:
“The split second I see any evidence of aliens, I will immediately post that on the X platform,” he told [disgraced ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson]. “It will probably be our number one post of all time.” […] “Well, unidentified flying objects are one thing,” he said, “but there are always a bunch of classified programs that are underway.”
A Pattern of “Permanent Improvisation”
This deliberate contradiction follows what German political scientist Karl Dietrich Bracher termed “permanent improvisation” – a state where those in power maintain control not through law and order, but through constant chaos and contradiction. Musk’s approach mirrors this strategy perfectly:
A long record of unaccountability has earned him recognition as the most prolific liar in the history of American business – a characterization supported by the documented patterns of contradictory statements and unfulfilled claims.
The Vegas Incident: A Critical Break in Pattern
What makes the Las Vegas incident significant is Musk’s departure from this established pattern. While he’s posted repeatedly about the event, he’s carefully avoided any mention of the technical claims – an unprecedented restraint for someone who typically responds within hours to any discussion of advanced technology.
This selective silence becomes more notable considering:
National Security Implications
Three critical factors suggest why Musk’s typical “permanent improvisation” strategy has been suspended:
As investigations continue, Musk’s selective silence may prove as significant as any evidence that emerges. The incident demands focused attention on:
The Vegas incident raises vital questions about the intersection of technology, mental health, and national security. Musk’s unprecedented break from his “permanent improvisation” strategy suggests authorities may be finally confronting the dangers from his reckless mixing of classified aerospace capabilities with consumer product marketing; how he has contributed not only to artificial inflation of stock price but also to radicalization of a highly decorated Green Beret to commit suicide.