Here at Tesla, We're Constantly Innovating New Ways of Creating Car Crashes

“You can play Cyberpunk, Elden Ring and 1000s of other games in your *car* with an epic sound system!!”—Elon Musk in a tweet, 12/13/2022

Here at Tesla, we believe in the power of innovation—specifically, innovating new ways of creating car crashes.

Most recently, we introduced the ability to play video games while sitting in the driver’s seat of your car. “What could possibly go wrong?” the skeptics might ask. Our answer: “Hopefully, everything.” And we’re thrilled to announce that with the use of our high-powered speaker system that drowns out all external noise, you’ll be none the wiser after you run over a family in a parking lot.

But to innovate, you must live like a shark: always moving to avoid death. Or, in our case, always moving to create death. Which is why we’re excited to announce a string of updates coming to all our Tesla models:

Coming in 2023, every Tesla will come with an automated “Road Rage” feature. Bother yourself with anger no more—your Tesla will do all the dangerous swerving, honking, and tailgating for you. Simply press the “angry emoji” button on your central display and let the pileup begin!

Speaking of your central display, by 2024 all Tesla cars will be made entirely of screens. That includes the upholstery, the side and rear mirrors, all the windows, and even the entire windshield. Ultimately, we simply don’t want you looking at the road, because the road is not a screen.

But what if the road was a screen? That’s right: we’re excited to reveal that, by 2025, roads will be screens.

And while we’re clearly obsessed with creating a dangerous driving experience, we’re also committed to getting us as far away as possible from community-forward services like public transit and green cities. With that in mind, we’ve begun work on turning all public land into highways. You live there? It’s a highway now—a Tesla highway.

And the final update on our current docket is set for 2026, when we promise that every Tesla we produce will get in a crash on your very first ride, or your money back. We want everyone (drivers and pedestrians) to experience the life-altering terror of being involved in a car crash.

That’s all we can reveal at the moment, but that doesn’t mean we’re resting on our laurels. We vow to never stop thinking of ways to make it less safe to be a human. That’s the Tesla promise.

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Behind the Writing

First off, I have no idea if I need to say this, but: the above piece, like all my writing, is satire. I am not Tesla, and Tesla did not say any of this. It is, as I dearly hope you understand as a subscriber to this newsletter, a piece of humor as commentary.

Now:

Elon Musk’s wheelings and dealings and firings and “Twitter Files” on, yes, Twitter have taken up a chunk of the news cycle this week. “The Twitter Files” are a thing that nobody should have to learn about, but if you feel the need, Tom Ley has written some terrific background over at Defector.

All that is to say: I did not feel like writing about Elon Musk + Twitter today. What I did feel like writing about is the unashamed entertainmentalizing (yes, a new word, by me) of the plague that is the Car.

Many of us own, lease, or at times borrow from our aunt, a Car. I do—I use it to get to work a couple times a week, because there is no public transit option that will do this for me. We live in a country that has, for the most part, decided that the Car is more important than the Human. But I would trade all the cars in the world if it meant pedestrian-friendly streets and forward-thinking public transit, as well as the end to the constant dangers to pedestrians, bikers, and, oh, also, the planet.

And one thing I cannot stress enough is how little we should care about a car’s entertainment offerings, which are, more accurately, distraction offerings. And we should especially deride entertainment offerings in cars with malfunctioning driver assist programs.

If you want to play video games or watch a movie, you can sit on a train and do literally anything you want, because you are not driving the train.

And if you’re bored sitting in your Tesla while you’re waiting at a charging station? That’s… OK! Boredom is… most of life. And it’s also the deal we’ve made by continuing to insist that cars are the answer.

And so, with all that in my head: today’s piece. See you next week!